In our present digital world, where a person’s attention span is under incessant assault, a single email sent from an easy to use CRM might not stand much a chance to win the attention of your prospects, and customers.
Nevertheless, if that email appeals to a customer’s specific interest or needs, its odds of finding the desired attention increases significantly.
According to Campaign Monitor, just by personalizing the subject line of your emails, you can boost up the email opening rate of your campaigns by 26%, while personalized emails are clicked 14% more and they convert 10% better than any other non-personalized emails.
The rub over here is that while it is true that personalized email campaigns can be a potential weapon for the marketers, blunders are also far too common, which happens all the time.
Therefore here are some of the dos and don’ts that you need to remain aware of before launching your email campaigns next time:
Do This!
Use Sign-Up Data as More than Just a Source for First Name
You can make illations based on what your customers are signing up for or where they are signing up from using the power of your easy to use CRM software.
Therefore, if you find that a sign up happened from a webinar, or from a piece of content that you published on the website do your research and send additional reading suggestions or your product and service recommendations based upon similar topics.
Help Customers Find What They Are Looking For
Big ticket purchases like buying a car or a house, can have an extended decision-making process. Therefore even when the customer or your prospect in the email campaign’s list is taking a break from activity looking into your email, they will always appreciate reading targeted emails that can alert them about new opportunities.
Wish Customers a Happy Birthday
One of the easiest personalizations for email messages culminates to two small words – Happy Birthday. This is because; getting your prospects and customers to provide that info is relatively easy, especially when there is no year attached to it, and it provides an opportunity for offering a highly personalized message once every year, as long as they choose to remain as your customer.
Now, if you do not have your customer’s date of birth, you can substitute it with a “happy anniversary” message based on the date the customer signed up with your brand.
Remind Them of Their Abandoned Shopping Carts
In recent research, it has been found that most customer’s open more than 44% of shopping cart abandonment emails. This is because “shopping cart abandonment emails” works as a persuasive reminder to the customers how close they were to making a purchase. One of the best subject lines for such emails can be “Not yet ready to commit?” and others.
Look For Creative Ways to Personalize
GrubHub Inc. an online mobile food ordering and delivery service based in Chicago, pings customers when it is raining, encouraging their buyers and foodies to order from their offices and homes to avoid the foul weather.
Toeing the same strategy, tire companies can remind people to put on their snow tires once those first flakes fall, or footwear retailers can persuade their customers with a sale of flip-flops on the first beach day of the season.
Don’ts!
Firstly, never fret too much about little mistakes.
Customers usually value the effort it takes to personalize an email and can be quite forgiving at times. However, if you are new, a startup or have a small business here are certain major mistakes that you should make every effort to avoid while sending your email campaigns using the best small business CRM software.
Do Not Leave Variables Visible
In many instances emails that open with “Hello {First_Name}” are ludicrously common, which is just an example of how bad and incomplete emails can alienate the readers and reflect poorly on their brands.
However, mistakes like these can be easily prevented, but simply creating logic that will help to populate variables with necessary alternatives for information that are missing in the emails.
For an example, if no first name exists for the customer in your CRM database , you might create a logic that will automatically replace that variable with something like “Friend”, “Buyer” or leave the field blank.
Do Not Get Things Wrong
Now, if GrubHub Inc. sends you an email that they should have sent on a rainy day when in reality it is bright and sunny outside, it is a small gaffe that can be easily overlooked and forgiven. But if brands like Net-a-Porter or Forever21 send emails to unengaged customers, congratulating them on their upcoming marriage ceremony in 2019, or wish them on the birth of babies they did not have, that can be considered as a major unforgivable faux pas.
Never Get Too Personal
There is a fine line that differentiates great personalization and acting creepy. Therefore, it is best for brands to stick with personalization that is based either on data your customers expect you to possess or on illations that will not creep them out (especially in light of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal).
For an example, a retail giant in the US did this mistake when they guessed that a young woman was carrying relying on her “pregnancy score” and did send her maternity-themed offer that was unfortunately intercepted by her ‘very surprised’ father.
Takeaway
Therefore, to conclude if you avoid these common pitfalls pulling off a successful personalized email campaign is not at all difficult, since customers expect and appreciate personalized interactions, which is a great way for boosting your email open rate and usher rapid business growth.
