Nowadays, it’s virtually common knowledge that email marketing is the top direct marketing vehicle available due to its higher effectiveness, better speed, and lower cost. But not everyone knows that it’s precisely these strengths that give email marketing its weakness.
Because of the instant and massive access to prospects and customers, some email marketers tend to discount the individuality of each recipient. You just can’t send the same email message to all contacts in a small business managers mailing list, for example, and expect things to work out as planned. Nobody would ever bother about opening some anonymous email outright. In fact, consumers regard more than half of marketing emails they receive as junk.
Adding correct personalization into your emails saves your campaign from failure. According to research, email personalization helps increase conversion rate by as much as 60%, making it the leading email marketing tactic today. But how do you correctly use personalization? The following should introduce you to proper personalization and help you apply it to a mailing list and beyond.
Correct personalization begins with gathering and processing the information you need for your email marketing campaign. You start by making sure you get enough and not too much data for your list. The opt-in forms that your prospects fill out to subscribe should have a reasonably personalization index (PI) value. In most cases, you don’t really have to worry about this since a good mailing list company would have taken care of this for you.
The next step in personalization involves the correct use of information from your contact database to make sure that the content you send is relevant to the recipient’s situation. Start by merging and segmenting the mailing list in order to find out which personal or professional title to use before addressing them by name. However, correct personalization goes beyond this. Your mailing list company should also have included such information as your contacts’ buying behavior, purchasing history, specific interests, small business characteristics, etc. to really make sure you place interesting and relevant content in your email.
Despite the clear advantages of correctly using personalization, only about 12% of email marketers have really explored its potential. With such an unfortunate statistic, it’s really no wonder why the public so easily shuns commercial email. So, if you think your brand deserves better, start applying proper personalization to your email marketing today.