Last week we talked about the importance of email deliverability – as even the most meticulously-crafted email marketing campaigns can find themselves consigned to the spam folder. Following on, it’s only logical to look at the different things you can personalise to improve the chances of getting your messages opened, read, clicked and converted.
Modern consumers demand personalization (as long as it’s derived from their self-reported zero-party data). In order to deliver emails that truly resonate, marketers need to deliver personalised messaging that shows empathy and an understanding of an individual’s likes, interests, history and preferences while delivering in the moments that matter. Here’s three elements you should be personalising, testing and optimising to deliver winning email marketing and build more meaningful relationships with your customers.
Best practice here is no more than 60 characters, limited punctuation marks and be careful if you’re wooing Gen Z and Millennials with emojis (use them to supplement, not replace words as different operating systems render different versions of emojis).
Testing lexicon, whether that be very descriptive language, urgency, curiosity or offer messaging is a starting point, but the key to rising above the competition is to establish an intelligent messaging strategy that goes beyond “casting and blasting,” or personalization that peaks at a first name in the subject line.
To win, your subject lines should offer products your customer has expressed an interest in, that fits their declared budget and contains dynamic content that uses keywords you know will elicit engagement from them.
If your customer isn’t engaging with your messaging, then you don’t want to be bombarding them. Conversely, a highly-engaged customer should be receiving more encouragement and nurturing. There’s no regimented “best” day or time to send emails or optimal cadence. So test.
Your communication frequency should be based on each customer’s individual purchase cycle and profile attributes. This requires a cadence that is constantly refined by optimal delivery times and campaigns triggered based on online behavioural data and other real-time customer signals across your websites, apps and owned properties, including in-store actions. Let the data tell you when it’s time to send a message and what the content should be.
With more consumer data available to marketers than ever before, there’s little excuse for sending inconsequential offers, products that the consumer has no interest in, or even worse, messaging based on data that has been surreptitiously gathered without their consent.
Initiatives that purport to be personalization are all-too-often limited to derivative curation algorithms of “people who bought item X also bought item Y.” It’s these kinds of unimaginative techniques that have led to consumers apathetic to the personalization they receive.
Rather than blasting your latest offering, leverage interactive experiences to learn your customers unique preferences and then put each individual on a unique email path that includes hyper-personalised content and offers matching their wants and needs.
At Marigold Engage we have the tools to empower you to collect the personal, behavioural and psychographic data required to power truly-personalised email, complemented with a best-in-class data-driven marketing platform with easy to use testing functionality.
Marigold: where relationships take root.
