Dear John, did you know that personalised emails maximise engagement?
In this blog post we are going to touch upon how adding personalisation to an email can go a long way to improving your customer relationship, and in turn, your engagement levels.
At its most simplistic level a good example of personalisation would be addressing a subscriber by his or her first name in the body of an email.
“Hi John”, “Dear John”
“Hi Mary”, “Dear Mary”
There is an argument that this ‘technique’ is used by spammers. There is some truth in this however, if personalisation is used in the right way and in conjunction with a professional ESP it is a highly effective technique that will seriously enhance your email marketing.
This is quite startling and could be attributed to a number of reasons:
- A lack of the relevant functionality. Perhaps the least likely reason and if your provider does not offer this then you really should consider changing.
- A lack of knowledge on how to use it. The stats above should provide gentle encouragement to learn.
- The fear factor; that it could appear as coming from a spammer. As mentioned above, used in the right way it can dramatically boost engagement. Still not convinced then use an A/B test to find out if your audience is likely to react negatively.
Once you have made the decision to use personalisation, the question is where to use it to maximise engagement. The obvious places are when addressing a subscriber in the body of your content as mentioned above.
Other places that can be highly effective; the from name, from address and the subject line. Keep in mind that the from name, from address and subject line are the only things that are guaranteed to be shown in a recipient’s inbox, so personalising them is a great way to grab attention from the get go.
Providing you have the source data your ESP should provide you with the means to add this in an easy fashion. In the example below we show you how this works.
If you can capture the replies and redirect them to respective account managers, then we are really talking about efficient email marketing. And all we are doing here is building on existing relationships to translate into further engagement. Below is an analysis that shows this very clearly.
So next time you hesitate about using personalisation, bear in mind that done in the right way it can be a powerful tool to boost engagement.
