You achieve better results if you understand preferences and behavior — and use it to be more personal and relevant.
10. juli 2024
"Hi <<FirstName>>"
Do you genuinely feel recognised when you receive marketing emails with your first name dropped into the opening line?
Both our own experience and a number of studies suggest that simply mentioning the recipient's name does in fact have an effect.
But being personal in your emails and your meetings with customers takes more than just using their names. You have to understand their preferences, their history and their needs.
Personalisation can lead to higher open and click rates, as well as increased engagement and conversion rates, because the recipient is more inclined to respond positively to content that is relevant and specifically aimed at their interests and needs.
A personal touch and the technology
You can build segmentation strategies that take account of individual preferences, purchase history and interactions. That makes it possible to deliver content that is not only personal but also relevant and timely.
Using automation also makes it possible to predict what your recipients want, almost before they realise it themselves. Depending on your marketing systems there are many possibilities.
You can also give the customer control of their own experience by, for example, letting them tell you about both situational and general interests.
Remember that when you ask about situational interests, you have to act on the answers straight away.
When you get answers about more general interests, you can use them over a longer period.
Whether you have answers about situational or general interests, it is important that you make an ongoing effort to get your recipients to update the interests they have chosen.
3 tips for success
Use automation to build advanced segmentation strategies based on customer preferences, purchase history and interactions.
Send targeted emails based on those segments that not only inform but also engage and inspire.
Implement AI and machine learning to predict customer behaviour and preferences (once you have the volume to make it relevant).
When you decide to work with personalisation, it is important to make sure there is a match between your ambitions and your resources (skills, time, money and systems).
If you sell products online, the easiest form of personalisation is to use an off-the-shelf solution for personal product recommendations based on behaviour and purchase history.
If you want to work with personalisation where you create the content and define the rules yourself, that usually requires you to produce several variants of your content, which then have to be maintained.
If you do not think from the start about how you can reuse content from your website or webshop in your emails in an automated way, it can quickly become an extensive and very time-consuming job.
If you would like to work with more targeted emails and do not have the resources for a more advanced set-up, a good start can be to consider whether you should sometimes exclude people when you send. If you send a special email about a single product, for instance, you might want to exclude the customers who have just bought that very product.