How to craft personalized email campaigns

In today’s digital age, email marketing remains a powerful tool for connecting with your audience. However, with inboxes flooded with messages, it’s essential to stand out and provide value to your subscribers. Personalized email campaigns are the key to achieving this and a big trend of 2023. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore how to craft personalized email campaigns to make the most out of this trend for your email marketing.

What is an email personalization?

Personalization is more than just addressing recipients by their first name. It’s about tailoring your email content to each subscriber’s preferences, behavior, and needs. According to a study, 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a brand that offers personalized experiences.

Main benefits of personalization

Personalization brings quite a lot of benefits to marketers who adopt such a strategy. For example:

• Personalizing subject lines can increase your Open Rate by 22%.
• Statistics say that 52% of customers reported that personalization increases brand satisfaction.
• 56% of consumers say they will become repeat buyers after a personalized experience.
• Marketers have found that personalized email campaigns increase revenue by 15% on average.
• Personalizing emails for users by localizing them in their native language increases the open rate by up to 1000%.

Types of email personalization

Personalized subject lines

Personalizing your email subject lines can work wonders in capturing your recipient’s attention and fostering a sense of connection. Whether you incorporate the recipient’s name or reference their recent activity, like a recent purchase or a visit to your website, these strategies can instantly make your subject lines feel more personal.

Addressing the recipient by name

When it comes to personalizing emails, the most immediate thought is to use the recipient’s name. With this straightforward action, even with just basic recipient information, you can transform an ordinary email into one that feels more tailored to the subscriber.

(Email from Adidas)

Personalized product recommendations and offers

This form of personalization is the most fundamental because receiving recommendations for precisely the products you currently require and find interesting is always a welcomed experience. However, implementing this approach requires a more comprehensive strategy because having insights into your audience’s purchasing habits and interests is essential. This data becomes critical when you aim to suggest relevant products and valuable offers that truly resonate with your audience’s needs.

(Source: Email from Simply Bee)

Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs are all about being personal. They’re like saying a big “thank you” to the customers who’ve been with you for ages and who tell everyone about your brand. Giving special rewards to these customers shows that you really care about them, and it’s a great way to keep them coming back for more.

(Source: Email from GEM)

Localization

Email localization involves a significant level of responsibility that goes beyond mere text translation. It necessitates tailoring each email to the specific needs and cultural nuances of the recipient’s country. Several factors come into play:

• Cultural differences that demand careful consideration. For instance, while Friday the 13th is seen as ominous in America, in Japan, the number 4 is associated with fear. Understanding such variations is crucial.
• Date format varies across regions, with European countries using the day/month/year format and Western countries employing month/day/year. Adhering to the appropriate format is essential.
• Local context, since It’s imperative to be mindful of the current situation in the recipient’s country. Sending overly cheerful promotional emails during times of upheaval, conflict, or other crises would be inappropriate.

Reactivation emails

Personalization is a must for reactivation emails, as they are tailored for users who haven’t engaged with the brand in a while. To effectively re-engage these users, it’s crucial to adopt a well-crafted approach, including the use of special offers, exclusive promo codes, and so on.

(Source: Email from Duolingo)

Birthday emails

We all love it when people remember our birthdays. Sending your subscribers birthday emails is a great way to show that each subscriber is important to the brand and they are remembered. In addition, such emails are full of personalization and don’t require much information from the recipient. Send a congratulatory email and provide a small gift in the form of a promo code or discount on the desired product.

(Source: Email from Nintendo)

Essentials for adopting email personalization

Email personalization is a complex strategy that requires a specific pipeline. It’s time to consider the necessary steps that will help you put the personalization of your email campaigns on the right track.

Understand your audience

To personalize your emails effectively, you must have a deep understanding of your audience. Here’s how to gather essential information about your subscribers:

• Collect first names, last names, and email addresses during the sign-up process. This provides foundational data for personalization.
• Create preference centers that allow subscribers to choose their content preferences, interests, and communication frequency. Self-reported data is invaluable for tailoring your emails effectively.
• Monitor how subscribers interact with your emails. Track opens, clicks, and email-specific behavior. Besides that, use tracking tools to monitor website visits, pages viewed, and actions taken. Integrated analytics can help understand the interests and intents of your subscribers.
• If you have an e-commerce platform, collect data on customers’ purchase history. This enables product recommendations and personalized offers.
• Periodically send surveys and feedback requests to gather subscribers’ opinions, preferences, and suggestions. Use their responses for email content refinement.
• Determine subscribers’ locations to send region-specific content or promotions. Gathering language preferences will require asking about them during the registration or subscription process. Besides that, you can use an IP address lookup and geolocation tools, as all IP addresses are associated with particular countries and cities. (You can obtain this information through third-party cookies set on your website. However, be sure to ask visitors for their consent to collect such information).
• Encourage subscribers to provide their birthdate or join date. Send personalized birthday and anniversary emails with special offers or messages.

Manage and segment your data

You’ve collected a lot of data about your audience. It’s time to start working with it to get the most out of it.

Segmentation is the process of separating your email list into several groups based on shared characteristics or behaviors. This allows you to send targeted and personalized emails to each segment rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

You can segment according to many criteria, but the main ones are:

• Age.
• Place of residence.
• Gender.
• Life cycle (just registered, newbie, involved customers, loyal customers, inactive clients).
• Customer behavior (on the website, in emails, etc.).
• Language.
• And much more.

The more detailed the segments, the more personalized offers you can give your audience.

Test and optimize your personalization strategies

For smooth and effective email personalization, it’s a smart move to continuously enhance your personalization strategies through A/B testing. This entails sending various versions of an email to different segments of your audience to determine which one delivers superior results. 

Experimenting with diverse content variations, subject lines, and calls to action (CTAs) is essential to pinpointing what truly resonates with your audience. Besides that, it would be wise to experiment with the timing of your email sends to find the best times for different segments.

Closing thoughts

In conclusion, crafting personalized email campaigns is a dynamic and data-driven process. By gathering data about your subscribers, discovering their primary language, and implementing effective personalization strategies, you can create email campaigns that resonate with your audience, drive engagement, and deliver measurable results. Personalization is not just a trend; it’s a strategy that can set your brand apart and build lasting customer relationships.