Personalized newsletters: get closer to your customers

Newsletter and e-mails are very effective marketing tools as they provide the perfect opportunity to personally address customers and present them with customized content. Most marketers personalize their content since it’s difficult to compete with the number of newsletters that land in customers’ inboxes daily. Many of these won’t even be opened let alone read. If you want to get a reader’s attention, you need to customize your campaign to them. We have some tips for how to perfect your personalization.

Most people are exposed to huge amounts of advertisements, both online and offline, on a daily basis. This tidal wave of information proves to be strong competition for every marketing campaign. The advantage of e-mail marketing: you’ve already made it into the user’s inbox! Although this doesn’t necessarily mean anything since people ignore information that isn’t relevant to them. But if you address someone personally, the probability of catching their attention is much higher. By using information you know about the user, you can personalize the content and provide them with added value.

The aim of personalized e-mails is to:

• Provide relevance
• Increase click-through rate
• Increase the probability of a conversion
• Improve the performance of an e-mail marketing campaign
• Improve the customer relationship on a long-term basis

The first step is to actually get the customer to subscribe to the newsletter and add them to your e-mail list. In order to clear the first hurdle, you should try to communicate value to the customer as early on as the registration. You have to make it crystal clear as to what the benefits and advantages are of registering and receiving the newsletter.

But how do you actually achieve this? First of all, you should only promise what you can deliver. If you promise the user special offers and campaigns, you can’t then send out newsletters with empty content. To be able to deliver the right offers and incentives, you should let the subscriber decide for themselves what kind of e-mails and the content they want to receive when they register. The best option is to provide various topics and newsletter types to choose from. Having an idea of what the user wants is especially valuable when no information about their previous purchases is known.

Once you make it into the user’s inbox, the next hurdle is the subject line. This is the deciding factor for whether the user opens the e-mail or not. Marketers don’t have a very big character allowance to win their customers over. Users typically open what they consider trustworthy and what arouses their curiosity. A very simple way to get their attention is to use their name since this will grab them faster than any other kind of content. In addition to personalized e-mails or personalized subject lines, you should combine the e-mail with a user action – like our examples show.

What’s important here is reliable subscriber information. If their name is written incorrectly, is missing, or they’ve been given the wrong title, they won’t read the e-mail. The sender address is also an integral part in attracting attention and creating trust as it’s one of the first things the user lays their eyes on. No matter how interesting and personalized the newsletter is, if the sender name or address look untrustworthy, the e-mail will be binned.

Trigger e-mails are based on events and play a big part when it comes to e-mail personalization. These primarily include e-mails that are sent out on special occasions such as birthdays or holidays like Christmas. These newsletters are connected with different modes of acquisition depending on the subscriber. They can be individually customized through the address, content, and even at what times they’re sent out.

Trigger e-mails can be sent out when new products are available that are similar to what a user has purchased in the past. Trigger e-mails are also used during retargeting and are always sent at specific moments, i.e. when an order hasn’t been completed, or the customer hasn’t shopped for a certain number of days. The aim is to reactivate the customer and these messages are often sent automatically according to a predetermined time pattern. A good example is consumable items, where it’s easy to predict when there’s a need for supply.

You can find more information on the right time to send out newsletters in our Digital Guide article.