4 Ways to Use Personalisation in Email Marketing

03/09/2019 | Share:

Email marketing is an effective way to draw attention to your e-commerce store for people who have joined your mailing list. By sending an email, you can inform them about product launches, offers or company news to keep them coming back to your site and making purchases. One popular method to incorporate into your email marketing strategy, that is proven to work, is personalisation. Using the data that customers kindly provide you, you can put in a little extra work to make each email contain relevant messages and personalised offerings.

Direct address

A good place to start is the well-known method of directly addressing the reader by their name. Most sources agree that this little personal touch is proven to improve results. You can use it on subject lines, email previews or within the email itself, but it has to be natural. Overdoing it in your email content, however, could cause a potential customer to delete the email or even unsubscribe.

Offer relevant products

If you’ve obtained your customer’s email address through a purchase, the likelihood is, you can access data on their purchase history. For example, let’s say you own a sportswear store and a customer has only purchased clothing related to football. Your efforts might be wasted on them if you’re creating an email marketing campaign specifically for swimwear.

Similarly to purchase history, you can use personal interests to influence your campaigns. Not everyone you email will have already made a purchase, but this is where viewing history becomes useful. Take Amazon, for example, who is well known for suggesting products related to your recent viewing history within their emails.

Location and timing

Using the information you have on a customer’s location can help you to more appropriately tailor your emails in terms of content and time of day. There’s no point emailing an Australian customer at 5pm GMT because they’ll likely be tucked up in bed and fast asleep (unless you’re targeting insomniacs).

It’s also important for localisation. You don’t want to make the mistake of marketing a product in a foreign currency or a foreign language! It can put people off making a purchase, immediately cringing over the thought of currency exchange rates, foreign payments and hidden costs. And if the reader can’t understand the language, you can guarantee it’s going into the bin.

Timing relative to a customer’s experience and behaviour is also another aspect you can use to personalise emails. If customers have recently abandoned their cart, you can send a personalised email within 24 hours to prompt them. You may even want to send them unique offers to subscribers based on their cart abandonment information or if they haven’t bought from you in a while.

Mixing it up

The best way to personalise marketing emails is to use all of the above methods, either at the same time or rotating through them for some variety. Personalisation strengthens the connection and customer experience by providing the right content at the right time. By doing this, your email stands out from the generic emails that are risking getting ignored.