By Saumya Gupta
The era of digitalization brought in the power of data analysis and its usability at a mass level. Data is available, but we often don’t know how to extract and use it to offer personalization to our clients. There’s a catch. We NEED to know how to use it to expand our industries and have a global reach for the brand. Personalization, according to marketers, will be the most important marketing strategy in the future. Customers like it when brands consider their choices and act on them. Currently, email customization and personalization according to the needs of the customer are making brands work on it extensively to promote their business.
What is email personalization?
Email personalization means customizing the contents of the email according to the recipient’s data. The recipient of the email is the customer who gave you this information. The email can include the recipient’s name or the product they were interested in. It can even include their location. According to this information, you can send them emails at a particular time or offer them special discounts on products.
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Collect emails to create a list
Before you start sending out personalized emails to your emailing list, you would actually need a list. Now, there are many ways to make that happen, and we would take you through this one platform at a time:
1. LinkedIn posts that went viral
Look out for posts with good audience engagement related to your industry. Since LinkedIn is a platform where an official engagement takes place, people often leave their contact details in the comments section. All you have to do is find the post and extract those details. People who comment on posts are likely to be more active than individual group members.
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2. Search for your industry related Facebook and LinkedIn Groups
The search box of these platforms can be very interesting, as well as useful. By typing the keywords that describe your industry, you can find hundreds or thousands of groups. Choose the most active groups and start posting about your business. Those interested will look at your business and contact you.
Apart from that, you can use extraction tools like Phantombuster, or an email finder such as Hunter.io. These help you to extract emails from the members of the group. It gives a major chunk for you to have a solid start at your email marketing strategy. Keep joining as many groups as you can, and use the tools to expand your emailing list.
3. Website Forms
Quality content from a brand makes potential leads agree to an email blast time and again. Curate your content in such a way that impresses your audience. After that, give them a form where they have to fill in their contact details so that they can hear from you again. And Tada! You have data that gets accumulated over time. For this, you can place a button below your social media post where the viewer can click and be directed to your form. Get details such as their preferences for products, what they like or dislike about your brand, or anything else that gives you a chance to gain more insight. You can do this on Hobo.Video. Make a video, start a poll in the comments section, and interact with the community at large. Engagement is important when you want to know your audience. We will explain to you why you need to do it later in this blog.
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Audience Segmentation Organises your Data
The data in your hands is extremely important for your business. But any resource is useless unless it’s tapped properly. It’s the same here. If you have an emailing list, you should divide it according to certain measures. You can start grouping them based on the criteria that we’ve pointed out for you below:
1. Demographics
If you’re a brand that sells merchandise of popular movies and TV shows, you can divide your audience according to that. A F.R.I.E.N.D.S. fan might fall in the age group of Millennials or early Gen Z.
The same marketing strategy you use to please a F.R.I.E.N.D.S. fan will not work on the newer generation. Why? Because they’re not aware of it. Similarly, while marketing a PS4, you should look at the higher-earning groups. This will help you a lot in constructing personalized emails for your audience.
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2. Market behaviour
Target people who have already purchased your brand’s products. For instance, studies show that people buy sports shoes every 6 to 12 months. You can use this data and target the customer that recently shopped with you. Combine these two, and send personalized emails to them after one year of their purchase. That email will be a reminder for them to shop with you again. It’s also an opportunity to highlight your latest products.
3. Engagement
There are people who open your email frequently, and then there are those who don’t like to be bothered. Two groups get formed here automatically. The former group contains high potential leads, so keep up the game. The latter clearly isn’t interested in your brand, so it depends on you to engage with them or stop spamming their mail.
Consider the Sales Funnel
A sales funnel tells you the kind of message you need to send to the user who visits your websites. If you’re able to identify the stage at which your user abandoned the purchase, you will be able to construct a personalized email that suits their needs. It’s one of the best examples of email personalization.
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Look at how you will identify the stages:
1. Product stage
If the user doesn’t like your product, they will definitely abandon the purchase while browsing through the product page. To get them back, you can customise a personalized email. Talk about the product and explain why it’s the right pick for them.
2. Shopping Cart
There are customers who put items in their shopping cart but never actually go through with it. Sounds familiar? Well, we’ve all been there. Do you remember putting your favourite food item in Swiggy or Zomato’s shopping cart, but not going through with it because your mom already made food at home that you can’t refuse to eat? Or when you’re on a diet but desperately need something from your favourite restaurant? What did Swiggy and Zomato’s marketing team do here? They sent a personalized email with the food item you selected and attached a discount coupon with it. And yes, 9 out of 10 times we couldn’t resist the urge! You can use this strategy for your brand as well to turn probable leads into definite ones.
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3. Shipping
If a customer was able to get through the previous two stages and proceeded to the shipping stage but did not go through with the purchase even then, it might be possible that they’re unhappy with your shipping rates. You can use a coupon to lure them back. Another trick is to tell them that the product will soon be out of stock and this might be their last chance to get it.
Now, let’s move on to the email marketing strategies that you can use to promote your brand.
Ways to Grow your Business
1. Use tags that are relevant to the user
Remember we mentioned website forms for collecting data? We’re going to carry out the discussion here because this is where the tags become relevant. While you make the subscriber forms, be sure to gather important information. Include blanks to get the customer’s name, email, contact number, location, experience with the brand, etc.
This information can be used while sending personalized email blasts to your users. For instance, you can mention the name of the user in the subject line of the mail as well as in the in-mail visual that you might use. Highlight products on the basis of their preferences that you collect through the form. Product-based email is an excellent strategy to remind users of your products and make them think about them. You can also provide them with special discounts and fast delivery operations based on their location
2. Run a timely email campaign
Time is very important while running an email campaign. What’s the point in contacting your customers at 12 in the night when they’re probably fast asleep or not bothered at all? So, to catch their attention, you need to work out the time frame between which you are likely to send out those emails. Employed people like to check their phones right in the morning. On the basis of this, you can send out emails at 8 in the morning. This is one time-slot that suits almost everyone.
But wait, what about the time difference? You own a business in India and send out emails at 8-9 in the morning. But, that time frame will not work with the residents of the United States or any other country for that matter. Here’s how you use their location again to benefit your own marketing strategy. You can schedule emails and suit the time difference accordingly. You can also look out for personalized time according to countries to have the most impact. It increases revenue as more people receive emails from your brand at a time they are comfortable reading it.
3. Initiate Behavioural Trigger Emails
These are known to be real-time reactions to your customer’s shopping patterns. Let’s go back to Swiggy and Zomato’s marketing example. When you add something in your cart and still let it be and close the app, they send you personalized emails with the name of the food item, the name of the restaurant, and maybe one or two more details. This is their attempt to get back the customer they almost lost and make them buy the food. Such types of emails are triggered by the customer’s actions and are automatically generated. After all, it needs to be done in a span of a few seconds, otherwise, there’s a higher chance of losing your customer. There are tools that you can use to generate trigger emails. Intercom.io is suited for B2B, GetVero.com for eCommerce brands, and SparkPage for B2C.
Conclusion
Now that we have given you ways to expand your business through personalized emails, you can get started by making the list. And yes, you read about the categories that need to be maintained while segmenting your audience according to their personal profiles. It’s a great way to catch their attention. Plus, this strategy has yielded good results for innumerable brands, so it’s safe to say it’s not out of touch. Personalized emails still carry a lot of importance in the market, even if we’re all surrounded by different social media platforms.
Social media platforms like Hobo.Video, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. have the potential to get you in touch with the potential community to serve as your audience. After that, it becomes the brand’s responsibility to use the information to interact with the audience on a more personal level. If the process seems too complicated, you can also approach people who offer email marketing services to make the process easier for you.
