March 28, 2024

4 Ways to Personalize Your Emails with Real Examples

All of us love personalized services. Regardless of the business you’re running, personalization can make a huge difference. The same applies to email marketing as well.

By collecting data on customer behaviors, you can find out what they’re interested in, which also helps you personalize the email tailored to their unique behavior and the interest. Best of all, personalizing emails are hugely helpful to enhance your email open rates and click-through rates.

Personalized promotional emails were shown to lift transaction rates and revenue per email six times higher, according to a study. Without a doubt, email personalization is very crucial to your marketing success.

List building vs. lead nurturing

If you’re on WordPress, there are a lot of plugins that can help you skyrocket your email list.

That said, when it comes to email marketing, growing your email list is just a part of the equation. Despite that you built a huge list unless you nurture the leads throughout your customer lifecycle, chances are you wouldn’t succeed in selling products to the list. And email personalization is one of the best approaches to nurturing the leads because rather than sending generic emails it helps you send personalized emails to your list that addresses the needs of each user.

Let’s take a look at different examples of email personalization and learn how you can personalize the emails to promote your products and services.

1. Retain your existing customers

As said above, email marketing is focused on adding your potential leads into your list and nurturing them throughout your customer lifecycle. In fact, email marketing can also be used to retain your existing customers and re-engage them with your brand. Since customer retention is known to be cheaper than acquiring a new one, the retention strategy like email marketing can help increasing the overall ROI of your business to a great extent.

With that said, as the competition rises among email marketers and the average number of promotional emails sent to readers continues to increase, it has been found that open rates of email are declining drastically.

retention open rates stats

How would you increase the email open rates? How would you retain your existing customers by personalizing the emails you send them?

One way to do this is by segmenting your existing customers into a distinct group and sending them exclusive offers or discounts.

Hostgator is the best example of sending retention emails to their lost customers. In their retention emails, they offer special 75% limited time discount to bring back those users who once created a hosting account and canceled it for some reason.

retention emails

Takeaway: Give exclusive offers to your previous customers who once purchased your product or used your service. This strategy not only is helpful to entice more people to buy your products on a regular basis but can also be helpful to develop a loyal connection for your existing customers with your brand.

2. Create a sense of urgency

While promoting an event, creating a sense of urgency can make your leads take an immediate action, so those who’re one the fence wouldn’t miss out an opportunity. You can implement the scarcity effect on emails in many ways.

Recently, Litmus used the scarcity principle in their email campaign to promote selling tickets to their event. They let subscribers know the exact amount of tickets left for the Email Design Conference, which can encourage users to buy the tickets before they all sold out.

scarcity

Take a look at another example of ModCloth.

urgency

If you’re a ModCloth customer and have added a product to the cart but haven’t completed the checkout process, ModCloth will entice you to purchase the products as soon as possible before the item gets sold out by sending a personalized email.

The tone and language used in this email are tailored to the target persona, which is nonetheless vital to the success of email marketing campaigns.

Takeaway: While sending emails to notify about the cart, you can use the same approach of Litmus. If a user has added products to cart but hasn’t completed the checkout process, you can use the scarcity principle to encourage them to purchase it as soon as possible.

3. Promote a product to the user who isn’t aware of it

Evernote is an app to collect, bookmark and organize photos, documents, web pages, etc. As Evernote is bundled with a lot of features out-of-the box, chances are an average user might not be aware that many of those features actually exist.

In their email campaigns, Evernote focuses on introducing certain features to their end users, which they believe that the user might not be aware of.

tip

Though I‘ve been using Evernote for bookmarking the web items for a while, I’ve never had saved any email into my Evernote account as I wasn’t aware of the email forwarding feature. So, this email was custom tailored to my previous product usage.

Takeaway: Aside from recommending products based on a user’s on-site behavior, you can also recommend products that your user might not be aware of.

4. Turn a negative action into a positive experience

As a marketer, it hurts when someone cancel their order and request a refund. The reasons for the refund request may vary for each user. Sometimes the user might not be the right person to buy that product.

No matter what, while sending an email that confirms their refund request, rather than sending a generic email, you can take it as an opportunity to make a positive experience to the user.

Hubspot’s email unsubscription message is one of the best examples of turning a negative user action to making a positive user experience.

Hubspot-Unsubscribe

When users opt-out from the Hubspot’s email newsletter, they’ll be directed to a page where a ‘breakup video’ is posted, which not only would bring a positive smile in the user’s face but would also help to create a positive brand experience.

The page also asks users to follow them on social networking sites as a ‘second chance’, so the users can still get connected with the brand.

Sidekicks’s unsubscription email is another example of making a positive experience.

unsub-sidekick

They automatically unsubscribe users who didn’t clickthrough to read any of their emails for a year. As a last chance, users can keep subscribed to the list by clicking the large blue button displayed at the end of the final email.

Takeaway: Rather than sending generic emails, sending cool personalized emails during a negative moment such as email unsubscription and canceling an order can bring a positive brand experience to your user.

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Shahzad Saeed specializes in content marketing for startups and small businesses. He writes on CRO, ecommerce, marketing and design. You can hire him for your next writing project.

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