According to the Richardson Annual Selling Challenges studies, one of the most important email tactics is personalisation. This means it’s more important than ever to personalise your campaigns to help you reach your goals. But what does personalisation actually mean, is it enough to just add a subscriber's first name?

In our opinion, no, but this doesn’t mean it isn’t a great start if you’re new to email marketing.

Studies show that marketers aren’t unaware of the benefits of email personalisation but have been slow to adopt it as an email practice. We believe this is because marketers aren’t necessarily sure where to start. We’re here to help you understand tactics that can help you out.

Using your subscriber’s name (in a different way)

Using your subscriber’s name is a great start to greet them, but you can try using their name in other places too. A great use of this personalisation is to use the subscriber’s name in your subject line. Using the name field in this space makes it more likely that your subscriber will actually open your email as the subject line is the first thing that subscribers see.

Behaviour-based segmentation to personalise

Segmenting based on behaviour is much easier than you think. You can start with basic segmentation like segmenting based on people who have opened or not opened your email campaign. You could thank people for engaging with your campaign based on whether they’ve opened it and keep sending valuable content. You could also try to establish a connection with those that haven’t opened one of your campaigns in a while. Segmenting based on behaviour can also help you clean your list and weed out subscribers who aren’t engaging with you.

Personalising based on location

Location is a great tool to use to personalise, if you know of big events or trending topics in a certain area, you can piggy-back off this hype by creating a campaign around this event or trending topic.

You could also use location to craft content around certain weather patterns. To illustrate, if you know a large portion of your list is based in an area that is experiencing lots of rain and you sell umbrellas, you could promote this to your audience. Equally, if they are experiencing hot weather you could offer your aircon installation services, or offer a special promo for this.

Build your data to help you personalise:

If you haven’t collected enough information about your subscribers via your form, you could run an information drive by directing people to your email preference centre and encouraging them to to update your details. You can also add more form fields to your subscription list to get more data from new subscribers.

Encouraging subscriber’s to update their details in your preference centre can also be an easy way to see what kind of content they would like to receive. Ask them about their interest so you can use the information to craft more personalised targeted campaigns.

Send your emails at the right time

This type of personalisation is often overlooked when it comes to email marketing - sending your audience an email at the right time. If you are an international business you might forget that your subscribers are not in the same time zone as you. To target and personalise your email campaigns to subscriber’s across time zones is as simple as scheduling your campaigns to these segments to send at more appropriate times.

Sending emails at a time that is more natural for your subscriber will ensure that you get higher engagement from your audience.

MAIL BLAZE TIP: It’s a good idea to test different sending times across your audience to see if it improves your campaign metrics.

In summary

Personalisation will help you give your subscribers a more relevant experience and result in more engaged subscribers. This can also help you retain subscribers, resulting in less unsubscribes in the future. If you’d like to learn more about email personalisation, have a look at Really Good Emails webinar on The Secrets to Really Good Email Personalization