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Take your Small Business Email Marketing to the Next Level with Personalization

Take your Small Business Email Marketing to the Next Level with Personalization

Today, before getting started, I’ll run you through some statistics about email marketing:

  • As per a report from eConsultancy, “74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement.”
  • Experian reported that “Personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates.”
  • Another study by DemandGen suggested, “53% of marketers say ongoing, personalized communication with existing customers results in moderate to significant revenue impact.”

I can go on and on to establish the notion that personalized emails are a league apart when it comes to driving CTRs and responses. Now, it all boils down to how you execute these personalized emails to make the most out of them. Especially when you are a small business and need to have the much-required brand presence and identity, this becomes all the more important. So, let’s have a look at how you can deploy personalized email marketing to place your business a notch above.

Create Customer Personas

Customer personas are created based on a multitude of data. You can segment your customers by asking them several questions to have a better insight into how they think and respond.

To have a better understanding, you need to create your email marketing campaign based on the data derived from the behavior and download history, along with the answers that the surveys fetch you. When you have created a customer persona based on their responses, it becomes easy to shoot a highly personalized marketing email series that would garner higher click-through rates.

If you think you can’t be bothered about creating ‘emails’ then getting professionals on board to assist is never a bad choice. Marketo certified associates or Mailchimp expert developers are the best in business to create those highly personalized and effective email marketing campaigns for you.

Customers’ time is valuable, and so is yours. They might tend to skip the survey, but you can make it an enticing proposition by offering a special discount when they submit the responses. Have a look at the below example from Tailor Brands, and you’d get what I am trying to say. Always remember, the better you know your customer, the better you would be able to sell to him or her. Hence, personalization mostly boils down to customer personas.

Leverage Location and Time

It’s a no-brainer that shooting your mails at a specific time would reap in higher CTRs than the spray and pray strategy. However, that ‘rush hour’ can be anytime depending upon your customer persona. So, why not leverage it and zero down on that sweet spot?

However, in case your customers are all around the world, you need to factor in their particular geography’s timing as well. As per a report by Experian, “50% of companies feel they can increase interaction within email by increasing personalization.”

For instance, when Starbucks sends a mail stating about the Happy Hour starting on a Thursday afternoon, it’s more likely to get people flocking to grab their favourite coffee. That’s how you nail personalization with your email timings and location. Not to be missed, they mentioned about the Happy Hour in the subject line: “See you at Starbucks® Happy Hour”

If you are having a hard time acing the personalization email game for your small business, then look no further than Mailchimp email templates or Salesforce email templates. You can directly integrate and customize them as per your branding and create highly personalized email marketing campaigns.

Deploy Automated Emails

Well, let me make it clear; I am not advocating to use just the ‘robotic’ automated emails that have now become redundant. Rather, what I propose is using behavior-triggered emails. They act as real-time reactions to your customers’ responses while using your product.

When Facebook sends you an email stating that you haven’t visited your Facebook page in a while, it’s a behavior-triggered email. And it’s a brilliant one at that. So, if big companies are using it and it’s bound to reap in benefits for your business, then what’s stopping you?

As per a report from Campaign Monitor, trigger emails have a 152% click-through rate when compared with traditional emails. Moreover, when you are a small business, you are in more proximity to your customers. At the early stage of business, it’s easier to make lifelong customers. 

The best way to do so is by reflecting that you care about them. For that, nothing can be better than dropping them a mail as soon as you notice a behavioral change in your customers. If a large group of customers is still not responding, then maybe it’s time to alter your brand’s value proposition.  

Wrapping Up

Personalization is all about making your customers’ feel special. It’s the same as when you take a person’s name in the middle of a conversation. The only difference is that the communication medium is emailing in a customer-business scenario. Remember, the more humane your brand and more importantly, your communication feels, the higher is the chance of business taking off. So, deploy the practices mentioned above and get going. 

Author Bio

Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers – email marketing agency that specializes in professional email template creation and PSD to HTML email conversion. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.

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