Email personalization techniques to elevate your marketing strategy

Email marketers view personalization as one of the best ways to engage with audiences and foster long-term relationships. According to a study, personalized emails have 122% ROI, and 80% of consumers prefer brands that offer personalized experiences. Email personalization works, but before we dive any deeper, let's explore what email personalization is.

What is email personalization?

Email personalization is a marketing strategy that marketers use to send content that's relevant to their audiences. It involves sending the right message to the right audience, in other words. Accordingly, personalization requires that marketers understand their audience's unique preferences and interests in order to customize their messaging.

In this digital age, when audiences have abundant choices, email personalization can help marketers stand out in their customers' inboxes. In this article, we're going to look closely at some of email marketing's most tried-and-tested personalization techniques you can use to maximize your email marketing engagement.

Topic management   

Give your audience the option to subscribe to a topic of their interest. These topics might include newsletters, webinars, product updates, or events, to name a few. You can assign topics to each contact in your account and group them. For instance, people who are only interested in receiving newsletters from your brand can be grouped under the "Newsletters" topic. By doing so, you're making it more likely that they'll remain loyal to your brand, since they aren't receiving unwanted emails from you.

 Segmentation   

Segment your audience based on their interests and preferences so you can tailor your email content. Here are some segmentation strategies:

• Geographic segmentation - Segment your audience based on their geography.
  If you're running a campaign that's relevant to a specific region, then geographic segmentation is the right personalization strategy for you.

• Content-specific segmentation - Content-specific segmentation enables you to identify your audience's interests and tailor your email content accordingly. Some might be interested in your blogs, whereas others might enjoy feature updates or news. You can conduct an initial poll/survey amongst your audience and then create segments so that you can send relevant emails.

• Demographic segmentation - If your business is going to organize a deal or offer for a particular gender or age group, you could send email campaigns to that particular group.

• Behavior-specific segmentation - Analyze your audience's behaviors when they're navigating through your web pages, placing orders, and engaging with your content. This can help you plan and trigger emails that drive the behaviors you want.

Merge tags   

Merge tags are your best friends for email personalization. Zoho Campaigns offers different merge tags, one of which is a name merge tag. It's important to know your recipient's name so that you can refer to each member of your audience by name in your emails. Greeting your customers with personalized salutations makes you/your brand much more relatable and likable.

There are a wide variety of merge tags you can use to pull names, email addresses, company names, and other details of your recipients. Here are a few sections where merge tags could be useful:

• Signup form confirmation pages - You can add merge tags like first name, company name, list name, list description, recipient email address, and more to your “Welcome”, “Thank you”, and “Re-subscription” pages. This will help you build a personal relationship with your subscribers right from the beginning.

• Subject line - Address your audience in your email subject line in order to make a strong first impression. Create custom tags or use existing and commonly used tags like first name or last name.

• Email footer - You can include your company's essential details in your email footer via merge tags, such as your company address, vCards, unsubscribe links, and more.

• Email content - You can also add referral codes and coupons to your email content via merge tags to ensure that you're personalizing your emails and building long-lasting relationships with your audience.

Dynamic content   

Dynamic content enables you to achieve modularity and is helpful when you want to display different pieces of information for different audiences without having to craft each batch of emails individually. For example, let's say you're sending one email to 100 contacts in your email list and that you want to personalize certain parts of the message, visuals, and CTAs for 10 of those contacts. Dynamic content enables you to send all 100 emails at once, but ensure that each recipient receives only the content they prefer based on the criteria that you've set. Here are a few additional ways you can use dynamic content in your emails:

• Text - Cater to each customers' needs by sending textual content that resonates with them most effectively.

• Images - Visuals like gifs and images will make your emails more visually dynamic and attractive.

• Buttons - Grab your audiences' attention by including call-to-action (CTA) buttons based on their needs and preferences. This will help boost your click-through rate and revenue.

Automation   

Email automation enables you to deliver timely and personalized messages to your audience. With automated workflows, you can eliminate repetitive tasks, nurture leads, and maintain consistent engagement with your audience. Automation works based on a set of rules and triggers, such that whenever a user's action sets off a trigger, they will receive an automated email, for example. Below is an example of you can use automation in Zoho Campaigns to send welcome emails to visitors who sign up for your newsletter via your website, for example.  

Conclusion 

Implement email personalization strategies to engage customers and build long-lasting relationships. When customers are spoiled for choice, use email personalization to nudge them towards you. With Zoho Campaigns, you can harness the power of email personalization through segmentation, topic management, automation, merge tags, and dynamic content.

Our feature-rich platform will help you elevate your email marketing game and enable you to grow and foster a loyal audience base.

Hopefully, you're well on your way to running personalized email campaigns. If you could use more help, remember that's why we're here. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us at marketing@zohocampaigns.com, and we'll be happy to guide you throughout your email marketing journey.