5 Effective Tips to Personalize Email Marketing

Create Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are a way to segment your audience, based on various attributes and behaviors. Of course, you already have access to most of this data, so it’s just a matter of analyzing and organizing.

When you categorize your audience by personas, you assign important values to each person, such as:

• Location
• Occupation
• Website behavior
• Download history

In terms of personalized email campaigns, buyer personas help you separate your audience so you can send more targeted emails. 

If you don’t already have buyer personas in place, then your first task is to create them for your company. You can learn how to do it if you read my blog post on building content around buyer personas. 

Use Location, Gender, and Other Attributes

Now that you have buyer personas for your company, you can leverage that information to build more effective, highly personalized email marketing campaigns.

For example, try segmenting your emails by location to make your emails more relevant and interesting.

OpenTable does a great job of using geographic data to cater to different users. Here’s an example going to folks in Chicago.

If location-based emails don’t make sense for your business, then think of other ways you can make emails more personal. Gender, age, occupation, past purchase history or even which pages of your website someone visited can all be effective ways to reach your audience in a meaningful way.

Map Personalized Emails to Landing Pages

What’s even more satisfying than someone who opens your email? A reader who also clicks a link and completes a conversion. 

Creating a personalized landing page to go with your personalized email gives your audience a unified, streamlined experience as they move from one screen to the next. It also increases the chances of them completing a goal, like signing up for a webinar, downloading a white paper, or perhaps even making a purchase.  

Make sure you use similar content on both the email and landing page, as well as the same calls to action. 

Leverage Behavior-Triggered Emails

One of the most effective ways to personalize your email marketing is to reach your audience at just the right time. The best way to do this is with behavior-triggered emails, which are sent once someone completes a goal or reaches a threshold. 

Welcome emails are a popular type of behavior-triggered email, which are automatically sent to new subscribers. Other opportunities include reminder emails -- when it’s time to renew a membership or purchase an item left in a shopping cart -- or reward emails, like this one Peet’s Coffee sends to loyalty members:

Personally, I love using behavior-triggered emails because they send automatically, at a crucial moment for the audience.

Test Your Personalized Emails

Of course, it would be remiss not to mention testing. If you want to create the most effective personalized email campaigns, then you need to test different versions to see what works best. 

For example, you might want to segment by location first. Then, depending on the results, you might want to try segmenting your emails by gender or age. 

Only by comparing one version with another version can we really be sure of what’s right for our audience and our companies...and get the best results.

Learn More About Email Marketing from Experts

Do you wish you knew more about how to use email marketing? Simplilearn’s Advanced Email Marketing Certification Training is a highly-rated, online course that helps you master advanced email marketing strategies. You’ll develop expertise in creative effective advertisements to promote products and services, create brand awareness, and build loyalty and trust.

Check out the key features of this popular digital marketing program.