The Art of Email Marketing: Let’s Get Personal

Email marketing is a critical component of a successful inbound marketing campaign. Did you know that in 2014, over 108 billion emails were sent and received per day in the business world? With so many emails in cyberspace, how do you make sure yours gets read? Lucky for you, email marketing software now offers you the ability to use personalization. To master the art of email personalization, there are five things you need to do.

1. Gather the Right Information

Presumably, if you’re starting an email marketing campaign, you’re collecting contacts’ email addresses and contact information via a form of some sort first. So, make sure you’re asking contacts the right questions. If you’re a marketing firm looking for new clients, you might want to ask the contact’s company size, annual revenue, job title and whether the company is B2B or B2C. If you’re a university looking to turn potential students into admitted students, you’ll want to ask for information like their year in school and program of interest. All of this information will help you personalize the message of your future emails. 

2. Segment Your Email Lists

Segmenting your email lists can help you deliver more targeted messaging to your leads. This also goes along with #1, gathering the right information. In your forms, if you ask whether the company is B2B or B2C, you could create one email list for each company type. Likewise, if you ask “program of interest,” you could create lists of potential students based on the program they’ve identified. Then, you could personalize the copy of your email to appeal to each list of contacts.

3. Personalize the Message

Once you’ve segmented your email lists, you can personalize the email content even further to make sure you are speaking to the needs and interests of your audience and providing them with relevant information.

If you use a marketing automation platform such as HubSpot, you can create smart content. This feature allows you to send different email content to leads depending on a list that they are part of or their lifecycle stage – but you only have to actually send one email! This same rule is true for calls-to-action (CTAs) – you can create a rule for a smart CTA to appear in the email based on a list the lead is on, and the CTA will dynamically change depending on the lead.

4. Personalize the Sender

Whenever possible, you should send your emails from a personal name and email address instead of sending from “no-reply@,” “info@,” “marketing@” or a similar email address. This will help your email avoid landing in your leads’ spam folders and increase the likelihood of it being read. This also opens the door for your leads to send an email back to a real person and therefore interact more with your business.

5. Use Personalization Tokens

This is the easiest thing you can do to make your recipients feel like they’re getting a personal email – add in their name! I’m more likely to read an email beginning with “Hi Samantha” than an email that begins with “Hi there” or one that just jumps straight into the email copy with no greeting whatsoever. You can personalize beyond someone’s first name, as well. If you’re emailing them to discuss something about their company, pull in their company name instead of saying “your company” or “your business.”

There are many different things you can do to add personalization to your marketing emails – start with these tips and test them out to see if your open and click through rates improve! Interested in learning more about email marketing? Download our free eBook, Your Go-To Email Marketing Guide, today.

Updated: Apr 13, 2022