3 steps to better customer personalization

The fact that personalization is a hot buzzword among email marketers today should come as no surprise. Consumers appreciate when companies deliver relevant messaging directly to their inbox. Personalized emails allow marketers to create highly tailored messaging at the individual customer level, making customers feel appreciated and loved. Even more importantly, personalization helps drive customers to take a next step. This level of intimacy goes well beyond simply including the customer’s first name in the greeting. Using data, marketers can create one-to-one messages that reflect the customer’s preferences and drive ROI.

If you aren’t sending personalized emails, then you need to start. Radicati estimates that 196.4 billion will be sent this year. The only way to get noticed in the increasingly hectic inbox is to send messages that resonate directly with the customer. Establishing a personalization stream in your email marketing program should not feel overwhelming. Create a plan to build personalization for your brand in phases, which will be dependent upon the maturity level of your current email program.

Phase 1: Basic personalization

To launch a personalized email marketing program, we encourage you to simply start with the basics. Basic personalization involves creating messages that are targeted based on information that your customer provided to you upon registration. This could include information such as gender, location, or birthday. Using this contextual data can help create a personal experience in email.

For instance, if your customer is based in New York and you know that a snowstorm is about to hit the area, then you can build a campaign around the information that you know. Retail companies can use this opportunity to push their snow gear, while a travel marketer might capitalize on the need for some sun to escape the cold winter. A ski resort, on the other hand, might promote its fresh show and nearby location. A restaurant may email a coupon to people wanting to order dinner in. Depending on your business and what you sell, you can take advantage of real life current events to personalize emails.

Phase 2: The preference center

The next phase of personalization in email is the intermediate level. In this phase, you should be looking at deeper demographic information that you have collected about your customer, which is usually accomplished via a preference center. Customers that have filled out a preference center have raised their hand to identify the types of emails that they want to receive. Customers share these details to express interest, and it is your job to ensure that your email content matches their preferences. Do they like all of your emails or just a certain type? A retail customer may only be interested in hearing about a store’s shoes as opposed to all of its products. A publisher’s customer might only want email updates about weather and don’t want their inbox cluttered with anything on sports, entertainment, or breaking news. Tailor each customer’s email to his or her individual preferences to build a lasting relationship with your customer.

Phase 3: Customer behavior

The third phase of personalization in email is to target emails based on a customer’s behavior. Site browsing, past purchases, and loyalty activity can tell a marketer a lot about the customer, and it’s your job to make this data actionable. Look at how customers are responding to your emails, how they are browsing your site, how they are interacting with their shopping carts, and what they have previously purchased to personalize future mailings. Adapting these data points into your email program is the key to creating a highly tailored and personalized email experience.

Personalization is no longer a nice-to-have aspect of email marketing — it is a must-have. Implementing a personalization program is not as hard as you think. Consumers are constantly telling you things about themselves, you just have to figure out how to implement that data and make it actionable to create targeted, personalized messages. Personalization shouldn’t just be a buzzword; it should be a best practice of every savvy email marketer.

Tony D’Anna is CEO at PostUp. 

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3 steps to better customer personalization