Email marketing. For many companies, it’s marketing’s bread and butter. A tactic that brings in an average of $44 for every $1 spent.
And the more personalized your emails? The higher that ROI climbs.
In fact, triggered, personalized campaigns generated 75% of all email revenue (with one-size-fits-all, unpersonalized campaigns limping behind with the remaining 25%) in 2013. And more recently, research shows that personalized campaigns increase revenue by 760%.
With stats like those, it’s pretty clear that marketers should be putting plenty of time and attention into email marketing—and the old approach of blasting the same message to everybody simply isn’t good enough anymore.
So, how do you get started with personalized email marketing? What do you need to know before you dive in?
My name is Angel Jones and I’ve been working with email marketing for over a decade. Recently, I put together a short webinar to answer those very questions.
I recommend watching the webinar, but if you need a quick overview, here are the three things you need to know before you get started on email personalization:
1. Get to know your email service provider.
What capabilities does your ESP offer? Can they support content blocks that personalize for individual customers? What will people who aren’t in those customer segments see in those content blocks? How exactly does personalization work within the system and what are its limitations?
If you’re serious about personalized email marketing, these are questions you need answers to. And if the answers come with a lot of limitations? It might be time to look into another email solution.
2. Get to know your audiences.
If you don’t know your customers, you can’t personalize for them. It’s that simple.
And so if you want that 760% revenue increase, you’ll need to spend some time getting to know them. Who do you want to target? What do they respond to? What content are they interested in? What topics? What offers? What have they engaged with in the past? Are they likely to churn? Are they highly engaged?
The more you know about the people you’re serving, the better you can serve them. And the better you can serve them, the more conversions are in your future. Just ask Amazon. Their recommendation engine generates 35% of their revenue.
3. Get to know your content.
What do you want people to accomplish and which of your content has a track record of getting them there? What offers are available? What do you want people to find (and why)?
Knowing your content helps you know where the gaps are (where you need to create more content) and which content is helpful to which customers on which customer journeys.
Personalization is more than just hello [firstname]!
Let’s pause here for a reminder: Personalized email marketing is about more than just inserting names at the top of the email.
Truly effective personalization means knowing which customers want a specific campaign or have an affinity for a certain topic and serving up an email that focuses on those campaigns and topics. When we talk about epic results with personalization, this is the kind of personalization we’re talking about.
Automating personalization through Lytics
So, where does Lytics come into all this?
The answer runs across all three of my suggestions.
Lytics can help you integrate with your email service provider
to build personalization into all your campaigns.
Our data science-infused systems are built to help you understand customers and their journeys. Our Content Affinity Engine tells you what topics and content each user engaged with. Our pre-built segments help you instantly identify who’s engaged and who’s at risk of churning. Audience Discovery gives you insights into who is most likely to convert.
And when it comes to understanding your content, the Content Affinity Engine has you covered there too. Instead of using dozens (or, dare we say, hundreds or thousands) of hours sifting through content and tagging it with topics, the system does it for you.
Which is why if email marketing personalization is a priority, we’d love to chat about how we can help.
