People respond more favorably to marketing when they feel
special and unique.
People respond differently to things when they
perceive themselves as part of a group. These are only some of the
psychological factors that come into play when using individual
message personalization as a part of your email marketing campaigns.
When done correctly, personalization can be a powerful way to
reinforce the bond between your company and your customer.
However, poorly personalized messages can just as quickly sever that
connection that you have worked so hard to establish.
The Initial Greeting
The initial greeting has a tremendous impact on whether a
recipient will read the rest of a communication. The tone must match
the type of communication and the type of relationship that exists
between the sender and recipient. For example, "Hi John" is good for
an email from a business to consumer, but too casual for a message to
a business recipient. A "Dear Mr. Smith" or "Dear John Smith" is more
appropriate for a business to business communication in email just as
in a business letter.
Providing References
A very strong technique is including a reference to a specific
product or service that the recipient has either already purchased, or
that they have requested information about. Don't forget to link
directly to the page on the site that corresponds to the product or
service you are trying to sell.
Affiliation
When recipients are members of a known group or organization,
you can create a positive tie-in. When using this kind of
personalization, you must make sure that the relevancy will be obvious
for the recipient. This works particularly well for sending partner
offers, but again only as long as the offer tightly matches the needs of
the target group, and will be perceived as relevant.
The more reliance your email marketing campaign has on your
database, the more important that it is to have the correct data. Errors
in your data can lead to your mailing showing how poorly you know
the recipient, not how well.
Always have default information to substitute in case you are
missing data. You can write your copy so that substituting this default
text maintains the flow of the narrative. For example, let's say you
plan on merging the "Company Name" from your database into your
email. Using default text of "your company" works well as in "We know
that XYZ Corp. can benefit from our services" or "We know that your
company can benefit from our services".
Lastly, always respect the privacy of the recipient and avoid all
sensitive information. Anything that might make the recipient
uncomfortable such as financial status or health status are best left off
limits when it comes to email personalization.
In conclusion, leverage the full power of your database to
personalize email content to individual names, histories, likes and
dislikes. In the world of direct email marketing, one size does not fit
all, so use available tools to make your email as personal and as
relevant to each person as possible.
If you look at the overall behavior of all of your website visitors,
you'll be inundated with a ton of information. Trying to distinguish and
identify patterns among such a large group is extremely difficult, if not
impossible.
If you segment or divide your users into logical groups and then
compare and contrast how they behave and what they do, you'll have
more accurate, actionable information that actually means something.
Segmenting your website visitors allows you to develop a clearer
overall picture of your site's performance. If the metric you're trying to
measure is how many people buy a particular product, it makes sense
to measure that within the context of how many people interacted with
the site in a meaningful way.
Since prospects and customers are always more likely to respond
to messages that match their interest sets, it makes sense to chop the
database into smaller, segmented slices based on preferences and
past behaviors, making email messages as relevant as possible to
each group. You may use historical data to apply what you know about
the likes and dislikes of your target market segments, and develop
your messages and offers to fit.
Hopefully the sections above have contributed to your understanding
of list. Share your new understanding about list with others.
They'll thank you for it.
Eugenijus Sakalauskas publisher
"List Building Newsletter"
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