5 Ideas to make your email marketing more personal
Personalised marketing is currently a big focus for many marketing departments and it’s easy to see why. Client response rates are much higher when they receive communications which seem to have been put together with them, the individual, in mind, and automated tools enabling you to do just that, such as the features available within MailFirst, are on the increase. Here are our five ideas for how you can make your marketing a more personal experience for your clients, without breaking the bank, or doing huge amounts of new research.
1 – Personalising subject lines and client names is easy and increases open rates
Clients are more likely to open something addressed to them personally, or which features a relevant message. MailFirst allows you to do this automatically at any point in the email, but it can be particularly useful when implemented in the subject line, which is the first thing people see and one of the keys as to whether your email gets opened or not.
2 – Include content specifically relevant to each individual client
It’s no use communicating with clients on something they’re not interested in or can’t make use of. If you have clients in the medical industry, for example, then they might want to know about offers for that industry, or industry specific topics like the NHS pension scheme, or union wage negotiations. Non-medical clients won’t want to read such topics, so make sure you’re sending them something else.
Did you know: MailFirst includes a system known as Dynamic Content, which can make sure each client sees articles specifically aimed at them.
3 – Where are your clients going after your email? Think about personalising this too.
If you’ve created a landing page for your campaign then you’re probably already halfway there with this step, but if you haven’t then think about the client experience after they leave your email. Will they see a relevant follow-up on your website? Does the email have a prominent link to where they need to go next? Email marketing is normally part of an overall campaign, so where’s the next step and is it clearly relevant to the email?
4 – Segregate your data in as many ways as possible; industry, age and gender, are just the beginning.
Splitting up your data makes it easier to target specific groups with specific messages and the above examples are just the start. If we wanted to send an email campaign out promoting MailFirst, for example, then we’d need to know which ClientsFirst clients already used the system, so that we could exclude them from the campaign. What’s a similar example in your industry and does your email marketing system hold the data to enable you to do the segregation?
Did you know: You can run queries on data held in MailFirst, producing ultra-targeted contact lists that will increase your engagement metrics
5 – Create triggers to communicate with people based on their interests.
A trigger is an event which happens automatically because of how someone interacts with your email. One of the most common is to trigger another email, based on the links a contact clicks in your first piece of marketing. Let’s say your first email advertises five products and a client clicks on one. The triggered email might offer them a discount of 10% if they purchase the product before the end of the next day. These highly targeted emails are simple to produce in MailFirst and produce outstanding results.
By Sam Turner. Sam is ClientsFirst’s Marketing Executive and writes here on topics including; inbound and content marketing, social media, design and e-marketing. He likes all of those things as well as travel, golf and frequent cups of tea. You can find him on Google+, Twitter & LinkedIn.