5 ways to make your email campaigns more personal
Living in an age of hyper-personalisation may seem overwhelming for some marketers, but for the consumer, marketing content has never been so relevant to their needs. Relating to your audience has been a proven tactic to help increase sales and keep customers returning again and again. Personalised content does this more effectively than any form of organic content and removes the guessing game from marketing.
Sounds pretty revolutionary right? It might even sound advanced or complicated, but the reality is that it’s not as difficult as you might expect. In fact, you could be adding more personalised content to your email campaigns right now with barely any extra effort! To be more specific here are 5 ideas to help personalise and tailor your email campaigns to your audience.
1. Speak directly to your audience
Starting off with the basics here but trust me, we’ll get more in-depth as we go! For now, let’s just focus on how important it is to speak directly with your audience.
It’s the whole reason for starting regular email campaigns in the first place, so why would you write as if you’re speaking to a group of people?
Imagine someone came up to you in the street and started speaking to you individually but acted as if they were speaking to a crowd of people. Strange, no?
It’s a fad that is long overdue to be gotten rid of. Include your subscriber’s name in your email, speak to them through your words as if you’re sitting right next to them and make them feel as if they’ve just received a one-off message from you personally. It makes a difference!
2. No need to be overly fancy…
If you’re churning out weekly marketing campaigns alongside the rest of your day-to-day tasks, the last thing you want to have to deal with is the graphics in your email not looking right across devices or for email templates to be fighting you at every turn. So why not just get rid of it all?
I’m not suggesting you stop sending emails, I’m suggesting you stop thinking that all emails must be beautiful, branded and perfect. As long as your email campaigns show your business off the way you want it to be, just send it! Even a text-only email with your email signature at the bottom can make a difference in the amount of engagement you get from your audience. It feels more personal as if you spent the time to look at their details and go “you know what? I’m going to email THAT person in particular”. Give it a shot! Trust me, you’ll be surprised how well it works…
3. Wish them a happy birthday!
Ever been wished a happy birthday by a company? It’s great! Costa will even give you a free coffee on your birthday. Now that’s some customer service! This method can only be used once a year and requires you to have a CRM system and know your contacts’ birthdays but it’s worth the effort, especially if your business offers mostly consumer products or services.
If you can offer them a special deal on your products or services, it’s a great way to say thanks to your customer for being loyal to your business. It’s also a great way to build up that loyalty or even get a brand new customer! Of course, you don’t need to put any money on the line here, it could just be a really simple “Happy Birthday!” email to make your recipient feel that you care. Just that alone is a great way to stand out from competitors and spread the love among your email subscribers.
4. Follow up after a sale
At Autus, we always like to remind our clients about the steps after you make a sale. Returning customers is the foundation of a successful business so you don’t want to forget about them as soon as they give you their money. It can also help convert a lead into a customer when used to follow up on their interest in one of your lead magnets. A simple follow up email after a customer has bought from you can help make them feel the love and will also allow you to improve upon your service. It also prevents any bad PR against your business from silent customers who didn’t enjoy their experience with your business. Especially if your business is online, they might not even bother to reach out and tell you about the issue they had but pass on to their contacts that they had that bad experience.
Being proactive really helps here and saves you a lot of time and effort. The best part about this one, especially if you’re already using a CRM system that is linked to your sales pipeline, is that it can all be automated! This is ideal for eCommerce customers or companies that just have a lot of customers to deal with. The fact that this technique can also be used for marketing purposes makes it one of the most versatile options on this list.
5. Use Dynamic Content
Finally, this is the fun one! Dynamic content, if you’re not aware of how it works, is content that changes based on the behaviours of a prospect/customer or/and based on what information you may know about them. For example, a user could fill in a form or a facebook lead ad relating to a new bathroom quote. Instead of being sent a generic “thank you” email, they can be sent an email with more appropriate imagery and links to different pages of your website that they might be interested in. Or it could be you know the industry they operate in (B2B example) and the content can be dynamically and automatically changed to show a challenge you can help with in their industry and the benefits your solution would bring.
In terms of adding personalisation to an email, this one takes 1st place. Not only does it allow you to engage a customer far more effectively with personalised content, but it also prevents you from having to create multiple versions of the same email. This saves you time and money while increasing engagement with leads and converting them more effectively.
Do you struggle to find the time to run monthly, never mind weekly email campaigns? If so, we should definitely talk! Our affordable digital marketing packages can help to generate more leads for you whilst you work away on day-to-day tasks. Find out more here. We also offer custom email marketing services to suit, so get in touch at enquiries@autusconsulting.com.
Join our Autus tribe of Businesses looking to grow!
Sign up and keep up to date with sales and marketing strategies, industry insights, How Tos, CRM, and Marketing & Sales Automation tools and much more.
About Autus
Autus provide Revenue Growth Platforms, Marketing & Sales Automation and Digital Marketing services to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.
Autus recommend various products for automation, such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Mailchimp and SharpSpring…it will vary on your requirements and budget the best option for your business.
Find out more here.
Our founder, Tom Berry, also provides selective fractional CMO services and is a member of some client boards.
Let’s keep in touch!
If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.
