Top tips for personalising your marketing emails

Content

The most obvious example would be marketing personalisation. The obvious things are names, account numbers etc. But with all the emails you receive on a daily basis you need to make yours stand out from the crowd. Try and use your data to drive personalised products and services based on what you know about that person already. Whether that’s website behaviour, previous email interaction, demographic, location etc.

Segmenting your subscribers

It doesn’t matter if your list of subscribers is a few hundred or over a million, each one is going to be different. This might be location, demographic or customer type and will of course vary from business to business.

Below is a generic list that can work for anyone:

Prospects

These are people who have signed-up to receive updates/emails from you or created an account but never made a purchase.

Active customer

These are customers who purchase on a regular basis. E.g. purchased something in the last six months and have been a customer for over 30 days (not a recent customer).

Pending lapsed customer

Someone who hasn’t been to your website or bought something in a while.

Lapsed customer

Someone who is on the verge of forgetting about you!

After dividing your customers into buckets, like the above it becomes obvious that you should be speaking to each of these groups in a different way. Perhaps offering an incentive for a lapsed customer to come back to you or updating your active customers on a new product or service.

Set-up automated and behavioural emails

Once you’ve segmented you’ll soon release that this is changing on a daily basis (or every minute if you have a large list of subscribers). To utilise this data, you need to set-up some marketing automation to target these individuals. I’ve provided an example on active customer segment:

Test and refine

There are of course no hard and fast rules when it comes to personalising your emails, so it’s important you carry out regular testing and continue to refine your content and let that data make your decisions for you.

Beyond email

The above suggestions can also be applied to:

• SMS
• Social
• Display advertising
• Mobile advertising
• Offline