The Pure360 Advanced Email Series: Personalisation

Introduction

Everyone likes the personal touch. It’s the nice feeling when someone you wouldn’t expect remembers your name or when the barista hands you your usual coffee before you order it. Good marketing is no different. It creates lasting relationships with customers by letting them know they matter and treating them as individuals.

It’s not just the warm fluffy feeling it creates that keeps marketers getting up-close and personal. Personalised emails receive 10% higher open rates, 14% higher click-through rates and deliver 58% of email revenue (DMA, 2015).

The days of the ‘one-message-fits-all’ sales pitch are over. Bombarding your customers with irrelevant email content is not only inefficient and costly, it turns the customer off. They become disengaged, key messages don’t get cut-through and your email communications become wallpaper in the inbox.

Before you panic that your latest campaign will be buried in the inbox forever, relax. We’re here to help you put together a personalisation strategy whatever stage of email marketing you’re at. From ‘insert customer name’ novice to creating a personal one-to-one dialogue with each person on your database.

How the Pure360 Email

Maturity Model can help you

Our Email Maturity Model can help you to identify appropriate personalisation strategies based on your level of email sophistication and industry. Using benchmarks set against industry standards, utilise it to provide you with a structured journey to more sophisticated personalisation and email marketing campaigns.

By identifying which stage of Maturity you are at, you can follow the below advice to ensure you are practicing all appropriate personalisation techniques, and look ahead to grow in your email and personalisation sophistication.

The stages of the Email Maturity Model

Broadcasters

Even a minimal level of personalisation can up the game of the batch and blast approach of the Broadcaster. Personalisation helps you show

your customers that you know who they are and that you care - even if you’re still largely sending a ‘one-message-fits-all’ approach.

Your current strategy may already include:

• Utilising personalisation tags in subject line and salutation.

• Changing the ’from’ address which appears in the inbox to a person who is familiar to the customer such as a store manager, account manager or consultant - people are far more likely to open an email from an individual.

• Utilising elements such as location of customer, age or gender in the copy to help themrecognise that you appreciate who they are.

Potential challenges

• Lack of data / missing fields - don’t be scared to use pseudo-personalisation if you don’t have the data by recommending best sellers in place of personal recommendations.

• Over familiarity - most people are happy to be addressed by their first name but reconsider this if you have a formal relationship or your target audience is older.

• Time hungry - it does take more time to create personalised emails but personalised emails are more efficient at creating engagement and revenue so you won’t need to produce as many campaigns to drive your KPIs.

Read more at www.pure360.com