Email marketing: Personalisation may no longer be enough

Consumers are able to peek behind the online ‘curtain’ like never before; a digital world that is easily accessible and understandable. Which is why usual personalisation methods in email marketing may no longer be enough. It’s time to ‘hyper personalise’.

Hyper personalisation goes beyond the predictable firstname input – there are some very sophisticated ways to implement personalising in this way into your email marketing. Here are just a few great ways in which you can achieve this.

It all comes down to datafields

Your data is the driving force behind all of your email marketing. It is these clever aspects known as datafields within email marketing that let you do more than just personalise by firstname – you can really utilise these features to deliver exceptional campaigns. You could, for example, tap into the power of your data to use location targeting such as, ‘Hi Joe, in Manchester this weekend…’. Other ways to personalise using your data include age range, gender and many more.

Once you start to create highly personalised campaigns like these, you can then take advantage of MailFirst features such as ‘optimised sending’ to propel your campaign even further. Optimised sending, which comes as standard with all MailFirst packages, cleverly traces your audience’s previous behaviour in order to be able to predict the best outcome when it comes to increasing the opens of your campaign(s).

Who are your audience?

You may send to a list of 100 contacts each month. Do you know all of your 100 contacts well enough to know who engages well with each and every one of your campaigns?

By asking questions and getting to know your audience a little better (you probably already know them very well), you can start to group your audience together, dependent on their needs. For example, 80 members of your audience like to hear about company news and the other 20 do not. By splitting your audience like this, you are able to tailor your campaigns to be relevant to the group as a whole. Dynamic content enables you to achieve this and still only send one campaign!

Who is it coming from?

An often overlooked aspect with many email marketing activities is the fine-tuning of who the campaign’s come from – a friendly ‘from name and sign off’. Business names, although professional, can often be portrayed as inhuman and cold. Signing your campaigns off from different departments, teams or individual members can all help towards creating a picture for your audience that you have thought about and taken the time to communicate with them

People connect to the people within a business, not the business itself.

Testing friendly from names and sign offs can be achieved using a MailFirst feature referred to as split testing.

Does your audience have a particular behaviour, or multiple behaviours?

If your audience has clearly defined behaviours, then to really make them feel they are getting the best experience from you as a company, you can add to that experience by implementing behavioural triggers.

A ‘trigger’ occurs in email marketing dependent upon an action that an audience takes which, in turn, sends a campaign. An easy example of this is that if they fill out a call to action, they could well receive a triggered campaign off the back of it.

That said, triggered campaigns can be used in much more sophisticated ways.

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Advancing your email marketing like this is a great way to strengthen the connections between you and your audience, as they’ll associate your brand in a good way with ‘touch points’ like these.

Remember, you can always visit the help section if you’d like more information on any of the above points to work towards advancing your email marketing activity.