Creating content based on your target group’s preferences has been a trend for many years now. The early idea remains the same but, thankfully, the technology behind the process has changed drastically. Gathering data, automating customized messages, tracking and analyzing results has become a lot easier.
According to research conducted by Evergage, most marketers agree that personalization helps to advance customer relationships. To successfully implement personalization strategies into your daily communication with customers or prospects. However, you need to have sufficient data and insights. Bringing all the data from different tools together remains a challenge for 55% of the surveyed marketers.
You can create personal content on your website or social media. But personalized content is most obvious (and effective) in email marketing campaigns.
Collect the info you need to send personalized emails and keep it up to date
Sending personalized emails isn’t hard. But using personalized emails to improve your conversion rate requires more than just adding “Hello Bill” to your intro. It all starts with making sure your receiver’s name actually is ‘Bill’.
As a company you can gather contacts data in several ways:
- By doing business with them
- By tracking visitors on your website
- Via sign-up forms on your website
- Via your sales network
- Via third-party apps
All this data is typically gathered within your CRM tool.
If you only collect basic information such as name and address, personalizing your email communication will be quite simple but maybe a bit less effective. Make a list of data fields you wish to acquire from your prospects or customers.
Name, address, and contact information are a given. But you can also track their buying history, interest in your product, contact history, etc.
For the 55% of marketers that struggle to bring all data from different apps together: you can use third-party integration apps or a native integration to gather all the information you’ve collected in your marketing automation tools or your accounting tool, in your CRM.
Create custom fields where necessary to make sure you can capture all the information you’ve gathered.
It is important to make sure all this information is up to date and accurate. Addressing a contact with the wrong name won’t do your marketing and sales efforts any good. Make sure you provide a personalized link in each email through which a recipient can alter their own contact information. This will help to keep your database free of spelling errors.
Use custom fields for personalization
Using custom fields can really revolutionize your email marketing campaigns. If a customer downloaded a specific ebook, you can easily refer to that download in later marketing campaigns, creating email content that is fully adjusted to your receiver’s interests. You can also alter the copy of your email depending on who you want to address: a client or a prospect.
You wouldn’t have to create separate email campaigns. Which, in return, will give you more time to invest in your day-to-day business.
Avoid mistakes by adding default text
Not all your contact records will be completely filled out. A lot of them will have empty fields, some may not even have a first name added to them. To avoid having inconsistent content appear in your email message, make sure you set default text to your personalization tokens. This text will appear when the necessary fields aren’t filled out for a specific contact.
Don’t forget to check your email to see if everything works. By sending a test version of your campaign to yourself and your team members, you can see if all conditional content and personalization tags work.