With many consumers disenchanted by the hordes of irrelevant, impersonal and ultimately lacklustre emails that flood their inbox, it’s easy to see why many emails are regarded as little more than unwanted spam.
This is why it is the duty of the marketer to tailor email content and engage their subscribers with unique, personalised messages that have something of substance to offer – something that will truly resonate with the subscriber’s interests.
Put simply, your audience giving you permission to email them is not enough.
“Having permission only gets you so far nowadays. Irrelevant and unwanted email is the new spam in the eyes of both consumers and internet service providers (ISPs)”
— Chad White, Litmus Research and Author of Email Marketing Rules
With this in mind, let’s find out how you can personalise emails to give your consumer a sense of value and appreciation whilst conveying your content to match your business goals simultaneously.
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Email content based on previous purchase behaviour is a great way to tailor content specifically for each subscriber. Based on what items customers have bought recently, you can recommend complimentary items or products that others customers have gone on to buy.
These types of emails are likely to have high open rates and engagement because they are very relevant and targeted, not just a mass-produced email hoping to catch a bite of the consumer cherry.
Browse abandon re-targeting
Browse abandonment emails provide a huge opportunity to try and capture lost revenue, and are a great way to reach out to a subscriber in a personalised way. If you can collect and store the browse history of a registered user, you can target them with an email that is populated with content related to what they viewed.
Loyalty Updates
Regular reward points updates could be a great way of retaining customers. A simple quarterly update email that shows how many points a customer has accumulated and what they could be redeemed against could be a trigger to encourage them to come back to your site.
It would also be a great idea to feature the reward points balance in the regular promotional email sends.
If a customer has built up a significant amount of points and had not ordered in a while, then this kind of email could be the perfect trigger to entice them back.
Milestones
Birthday emails are a great opportunity to send a personalised email. Make your customer feel special and offer them a birthday gift.
Put an expiry date on the gift to create a sense of urgency.
You could also use a similar approach for the anniversary date of when the recipient became a customer.
Favourite item dropped in price
If you know that a customer regularly buys a certain product, and you have just dropped the price then let them know via email:
“Hi Samantha, one of your favourite products has just gone on special offer! Stock up today.”
This approach would also work for items that are soon to be discontinued by your suppliers. You can reach out to your customer and suggest alternative items that may be suitable for future purchases.
Product Reviews
Encouraging product reviews from customers is a great way of creating unique user generated content for your site.
Product reviews can play a big role in encouraging others to buy, and email marketing can be used to drive customers back to your site post purchase to leave their thoughts.
It is recommended that an automatic trigger email is sent out 2-3 weeks after purchase that encourages users to leave a review.
Basket Abandonment
A well thought out and executed abandoned basket message can bring back customers to your site that left in the buying process, and drive additional revenue that may otherwise have been lost.
It is essential that this trigger message is timely and makes it extremely easy for the user to click through back to your site and complete the purchase.
Email marketing is a great way to get more out of your existing customer base – if you’d like to talk about getting more from your email marketing, call us on 0845 450 2086.