Top Strategies For Email Personalization

According to respondents in a recent Formation.ai survey the top three strategies for personalizing a product or service that would increase brand loyalty were:

• Website experiences tailored to you
• Email marketing
• Cellular notifications

These results, as modern marketers seem to help us focus our marketing programs to the channels most important to customers.

The same respondents listed exactly the three top personalization strategies most likely to reduce loyalty.

As an email marketer, you should constantly be looking for new and relevant ways to engage with prospects, clients, and partners.  When asked what their three top priorities were for 2021 in Litmus’ State of Email Survey, marketers ranked automation, personalization and testing. It’s fascinating to see that, in order to provide true personalized one-to-1 engagements, marketers need to address these three areas accurately, systematically, and scaleably.

Personalization is a fine line.  Customers expect the same personal, relevant experiences from your company, whether you sell B2B, B2C or both. They also want to be able to access Netflix, Amazon and Spotify.  This business imperative is highlighted in an Accenture Interactive Study, which found that 87% consumers believe it important to buy from brands who understand “the real me”.

Imagine this scenario: You buy a home in the Northeast just before winter. You head over to the big box hardware store before moving to buy some supplies. Two weeks after moving into your home, you receive an email with the message “Welcome home!”  This welcome kit includes some helpful tips, and there’s also a coupon that will help make your home more cozy.  Sometime later, you receive an SMS and email notification from that retailer a few days before your first snowfall.

Here’s an example of great personalization.  You are targeted by the retailer with an offer that is relevant to your needs at the precise moment. This creates brand loyalty and a connection with the consumer that makes them return for more.

Why do brands fail to provide true customer personalization in email marketing despite the overwhelming evidence?

From afar, it appears that the personal experience described above is seamless. Under a magnifying glass, thousands of data-points must be triangulated and intelligently orchestrated in real-time. The customer journey is the starting point of a complex and highly-complex process.

Begin with your customer journey

A successful personalization strategy begins with an in-depth understanding of your customer’s journey.  This includes every interaction your customer has had with you.  It includes everything from the moment they first search for you online, through their first visit to your site, browsing all your content and products, placing their order, and finally receiving it.  This includes all emails, text messages, phone conversations and newsletters that your company has with customers.  It is all the interactions they have with your brand. You can get an in-depth view of each customer by analyzing their touchpoints during the journey. This will help you determine the future purchasing trends and make recommendations that are relevant. It also allows you to personalize your experience so they feel a connection to your brand.

Evolve your segmentation strategy

Segmentation and personalization can be used interchangeably. However, personalization is more than just adding names to emails. It also goes beyond segmenting the audience by demographic information like age or gender. According to the Formation.ai survey, 75% consumers stated that they frequently open marketing emails that contain their name. Although being addressed by their name is a welcome open, this misses the opportunity to provide them with relevant information, products and services.

Some companies build microsegments that are intelligent and based on factors like past purchases, browsing behaviors, emails opened, or interests. The signals are manually analyzed to determine the most relevant cohorts. Micro-segmentation can help brands customize their content better, but these methods often fall short in delivering personalized experiences. This is partly due to the fact that segmentation communications are created and sent manually. Most brands can only manage a small number of microsegments. This limits their ability to provide true 1:1 personalization.

AI & ML: Get to know you better

Brands will realize the promise of personalization when they can easily and quickly analyze disparate data to create millions of customized communications and offers, one for every customer. Brands should use technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data analytics to help them engage their customers more effectively.

AI can extract customer insights, such as motivations. This allows marketers to automate their data collection and offer targeting processes for greater engagement. ML also identifies context, such as the most appropriate email to send an individual client and the time to do so.

AI and machine learning, once considered too futuristic by marketers, are the most important technologies of the 21st century. Email marketing is a rapidly growing field. I’m seeing a number of companies utilizing email data in order to make predictions about the timing of campaigns and offer recommendations for future ones, improve post-purchase engagement and drive performance on all marketing channels including paid media.

Scott Galloway says in his latest book Post Corona: Crisis to Opportunity that “the pandemic will have the most lasting impact as an accelerator.” In less than a year, market trends had advanced by ten years, so Galloway explained that customer expectations and behavior would be accelerated to 2030.

Modern marketers have a responsibility to reach customers at their current level (in 2030). Human-to-human interactions are key, allowing customers to have experiences with brands that are so customized for their needs, motivations and interests as to make them feel like they’re the only recipients. You get much more when you make an investment in personalization. More engagement, higher conversions, increased sales.

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