Keeping your customers engaged and your brand front of mind has never been harder. The device that lets you reach your customers instantly is also the device they use to stream, scroll, shop, chat, message, call and do everything else in their online lives. The competition for attention is relentless and the mental filtering people have developed to manage it means your email marketing needs to be spot on.
The good news is that the tools and data available to email marketers have never been better but what’s required to get the most out of them is a considered approach. One that’s built around what your customers actually want rather than what’s easiest to send.
Hello <first name>, goodbye interest
Treating personalisation as putting someone’s first name in a subject line is so twenty years ago! Customers who receive emails that don’t reflect their interests quickly pass them by.
Personalisation means sending a message to a specific person based on what they’ve actually done – their purchase history, their browsing behaviour, their engagement patterns. Even basic targeting outperforms sending the same email to everyone and the data to do it is almost certainly already sitting in your ESP or CRM platform.
As a minimum, most email marketers should be able to:
- Identify their most valuable customers and treat them accordingly
- Understand who is engaging and who has gone quiet
- Use purchase and browsing history to inform what products or content to feature
- Know when their audience is most likely to interact and send at these times
Beyond that you can use preference centres, behavioural triggers, trend analysis and RFM modelling (recency, frequency, monetary value) to give you the raw material to send emails that feel genuinely personal rather than broadcast.
Rise of the machines
The gap between what the best marketers are doing and what everyone else is doing has widened significantly in the past few years. Up until recently, ‘big data’ was something only the largest organisations could mine and use effectively. Then along came AI and added the ‘intelligence’ layer that started to use information from the biggest dataset of all – the internet.
But, of course, AI works best in an enclosed system where data is robust and query output reliable.
Sophisticated predictive models can now rank customers by likelihood to purchase, churn or respond to a specific type of message. Recommendation engines can show the right product to the right person based on behaviour at an individual level. Propensity models gives a steer on how customers change and move across data segments. And they can do it at scale. Real-time personalisation tools can adapt email content dynamically using a multitude of data points.
The brands investing in these capabilities are pulling ahead.
That said, the fundamentals matter more than the technology. The most sophisticated recommendation engine in the world won’t compensate for bad or incomplete data, a poorly designed email, badly written copy or a sending frequency that encourages your subscribers to tune out.
Testing times
A common mistake with personalisation is trying to do too much too quickly. Define your goals specifically – “increased revenue” isn’t a goal, it’s an outcome. Ask yourself what behaviour are you trying to influence and in whom?
Build a testing plan into your regular activity. Choose segments that best match your test attributes and isolate them so you can measure properly. Roll out what works and retire what doesn’t. Personalisation is an iterative process and the brands that do it best are the ones that have been refining their approach consistently over time.
Content is king, but context is kingdom
Personalisation isn’t just about what you send – it’s about when, where and why your email is likely to be read. An email opened at 7am during a commute on a phone is a different context to one opened at 8pm on at home with a laptop or tablet. The call to action that works in one setting may perform differently in another.
Think about the journey your email is part of. Where is your customer in their relationship with your brand? What did they do last time they heard from you? What are they likely to do next? The more clearly you can answer those questions the more relevant your emails will feel – and relevance is what keeps people subscribed, engaged and buying.
Endgame
The goal of personalisation is to make every email feel like it was sent specifically for each subscriber and worth reading. Get that right and email stops feeling like marketing and starts feeling like a service.
That’s what makes emails more useful.