Wondering why email marketing doesn’t work for you despite spending your time and effort to make it more engaging?
For most marketers, lack of personalization is the single most common reason their email marketing doesn’t work.
More than 413 commercial emails are hitting the inbox of an average email subscriber. That means it’s hard to get your emails noticed, let alone drive engagement and conversions. Personalization helps your email stand out in the inbox, and could lead to driving more engagement.
Personalization doesn’t just mean including a person’s first name in the subject line. When it comes to email personalization, you need to look at the big picture and optimize the way you capture the emails of your target audience, segment, and convert them.
Now that you know personalization can make your email stand out in your inbox and boost engagement, let’s take a look at a few ways to implement it in your email marketing.
How to improve email marketing: attract the right audience
Before we dive in to look at the different strategies, it’s worth taking time to check whether you’re attracting the right audience to your list. Obviously, your email personalization efforts will never work on a disinterested audience.
Growing and sustaining an email list takes time and work. This makes purchasing an email list from a third-party incredibly appealing. But when you buy an email list, you’re purchasing a list of strangers you have no connection with. People don’t like to be contacted by a stranger, which will make your personalization efforts less effective.
Although attracting the right audience to your list takes significant time and effort, it’s worthwhile to put the work in.
If you don’t want to spend too much time growing your list, you may use OptinMonster to transform your website into a lead generation machine. OptinMonster lets you create multiple types of opt-in forms and lets you build hyper-targeted email list using different targeting options. With its exit intent technology, you can even turn your abandoning visitors into leads by prompting them with a targeted campaign at the precise moment they’re about to leave.
Segment your email list
Email segmentation might seem like an entry-level strategy for veteran email marketers, but surprisingly, many marketers overlook the importance of this tactic.
Segmentation is the difference between sending mass emails to your entire list and sending targeted emails to an individual group based on their mutual interest. Segmentation is the backbone of email personalization because it is impossible to personalize the emails you send to your potential customers manually.
Email segmentation allows you to classify your leads into distinct groups based on the customer personas, onsite behavior, form data, etc. so that you can send personalized emails addressing the common interest of each group.
If you’re looking for email segmentation ideas, consider the following:
Customers’ interests: Learn the onsite behavior of your customers and segment your leads based on their common interest.
Inactivity: An average of 60% of lists are dead email subscribers. You can create a segment based on email inactivity, and send a series of win-back emails to make those inactive subscribers reengaged.
Email preferences: Sending too many emails to your leads will make them opt out from your email list. Ask your subscribers how often they wish to receive your emails or what they’re interested in receiving and segment your leads based on their preferences.
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Setup behavioral trigger emails
The automated behavioral trigger emails are real-time reactions of how customers are using your product. For example, Facebook sends you a behavior-triggered email if you haven’t logged into the site for five days, and it works incredibly well.
The automated behavioral trigger emails are proven to drive in 152% higher open rates, compared with traditional emails.
To create and send a behavioral trigger email, you first need to track all the on-site customer actions in real-time on your site. Once you have the data, you can create richer profiles of your leads so that you can set up and test new campaigns to target segments based on the database.