If you think that email personalization starts and ends with only using your customer’s name, you’ve got problems! Email personalization is so much more than just addressing your customers by their name. It’s making sure that the emails you send them are relevant to their interests and what types of products they’re looking for.
Sure, it involves segmenting your email lists, so that you’re not just sending mass, bulk emails to everyone on your list—but that’s only part of the picture. Successful email personalization means tailoring the subject line and email content to your customers, based on data you’ve gathered from their shopping habits on your site and opt-in information that they share.
Simply put: If you’re not harnessing the power of email personalization, then your online store is missing out on a lot of potential conversions and, therefore, revenue. Don’t let that keep happening!
Consider these spectacular benefits of personalizing your emails to customers.
Outrageously Higher Conversion Rates
When we talk about conversion rates here, we don’t just mean a sale on your website. We mean the mini conversions that need to happen way before someone finally purchases from your site.
Numerous studies over the years confirm that personalization helps conversions a great deal in email marketing.
Take an Adestra July 2012 report that revealed:
Personalized subject lines have a 22.2% higher likelihood of being opened
An Experian survey from 2015 reported that:
Emails featuring personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to get opened
Clearly, if you’re not personalizing your subject lines with the names of your customers and news that’s relevant to them (like sales on products they care about), then you’ll lose out on conversions.
Moving on, let’s talk about unique open and click rates. According to another Experian study, this one from 2013:
- Personalized promotional emails produced 29% higher unique open rates
- Personalized promotional emails produced 41% higher unique click rates
Perhaps the most persuasive email-personalization stat is this one, where segmented and personalized campaigns generated a 760%-lift in email revenue. Think about that improvement for a second—that’s enormous!
So for more conversions in the sense of open and click rates, which also increase the likelihood of the ultimate conversion (read: purchases) farther down the sales funnel, personalize your emails.
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Increasing Customer Retention
Another benefit of email personalization is the very positive effect it can have on reducing your customer churn — or the number or rate of customers who simply won’t interact with or buy your product or service anymore.
As an example, churn could be caused by your customers actually losing interest in your brand because you don’t engage them enough and therefore fail to continue to see the value in your offerings.
A customer who has been a long time purchaser from your store likely has different interests and preferences than someone buying from your store the first time. With all the data you’ve collected from them you should be sending them a curated collection of products based on their preferences, not just the same products you send to everyone else. 73 percent of consumers prefer to do business with online retailers who use personal information to make their shopping experience more relevant.
If you ignore the data and keep sending products that aren’t relevant, your customers interest and purchases are likely to drift away from your brand. But if you keep your product promotions fresh and personalize your selection, you can reduce churn and thereby increase customer retention.
It isn’t just product selection that needs to personalized. Sometimes, your customers will start an action on your site and not carry it through to completion—whether that’s abandoning a purchase altogether or perhaps failing to complete a task in a registration sequence. Such a situation is the perfect opportunity for a personalized triggered email that reminds or gently prods them to finish what they were doing.
The beauty of such triggered emails is twofold:
- Your customer will complete whatever action they initially took on your site, which is a conversion for you
- By responding to your personalized triggered email, your customer is providing you with integral data about their behavior, which you can use for even more detailed customer segmentation down the road
So when you send personalized emails, you reduce churn, find out more integral data about your customer, and come away with more information for future segmentation.
Ahead of the Curve
When it comes to digital marketing like email, it’s always best to anticipate where the tide is going. Understanding this will help you communicate with your customers more effectively than what many in your industry are currently doing. As a result, your ecommerce business will have better customer service than many of your competitors—greatly helping in giving you an advantage in your market.
Let’s take a look at sentiment, which is so important. According to an Econsultancy and Adestra Email Marketing Industry Census report from 2016, 78% of respondents think that all emails will be personalized in the next, five years. That’s huge!
When almost four out of five people in email marketing think that personalization will be the norm soon, that’s a key indicator of how your customers want your business to communicate with them. So don’t ignore such an important finding: Get ahead of the curve and begin implementing personalization, such as automated product recommendations, which our SmartMail platform will let you easily do.
Sure, the stats are depressing when it comes to how many retailers are currently personalizing their emails, with just 39% saying they do so, based on a survey.
But that’s where your opportunity lies: Get ahead of the curve today, and communicate with your customers relevantly and how they expect you to. You’ll see great results this way.
No Downside to Email Personalization
It’s rare when a form of digital marketing yields consistently awesome and powerful results, but email personalization is exactly such a reality. Too many businesses today already annoy and waste the time of their customers by sending them emails that are generic and not tailored to their interests and needs. As a result, such emails are often rightly marked as spam and denounced as bulk email newsletters.
That’s because such overly general emails have no value for your customers. What’s worse is some of these recipients will turn you off for good, and you’ll lose valuable customers all because you failed to send personalized emails.
Don’t let that happen to your brand. Instead, respect the usefulness of email personalization, and begin incorporating it into your customer communications. SmartrMail’s personalization is just the solution you’re looking for, so try it today!
