If you are aiming for greater click-through rates, higher conversion rates, and increased turnover, personalisation is a major factor you can’t afford to ignore. Personalised images and texts will make your email marketing stand out from the stack of mail that inevitably lives in your ideal customer’s inbox.
On top of that, you need to make sure that your deliverability is up to scratch. Without good deliverability, your ideal customer could easily miss your email altogether.
Personalisation Is Really about Relevance
When you take the time to personalise an email marketing campaign, it becomes more relevant, and hence more attractive, to the recipient. Basic personalisation can be based on demographic attributes, but it can also be based on past actions or interests that you have noticed in a particular (future) customer. Maybe this customer has visited your website, interacted with your business on social media, or even bought from you before. All these actions are clues to what interests this customer, so you must take care to analyse them and draw the necessary conclusions. Once you have gathered enough data on a customer, you are ready to start tailoring your email marketing.
Personalise All Content, Not Just Text
Many businesses already make use of personalised text content, but often they will use the same images and logos, even if their target audience consists of other businesses as well as regular consumers. If you take personalisation one step further and also personalise all images, for example, one set of images for business-to-business (B2B) communication and another set for business-to-consumer (B2C) communication, you are bound to benefit from higher click-through rates and increased conversion. That is because businesses expect B2B email marketing to have a certain tone. This tone is very different from how you would talk to a regular consumer, and images help to set that tone in a marketing email.
Deliverability Ensures You Bypass the Spam Filter
While a personalised marketing email attracts more attention once it is in a recipient’s inbox, you still need to make sure that it actually gets there. Many marketing emails are blocked by spam filters. But if you take the time to improve the email’s deliverability, you can bypass the filters and achieve better visibility.
To improve a marketing email’s deliverability you must pay attention to the following things:
Make sure your email authentication information (SPF, Sender ID, DKIM, DMARC, etc.) is set up correctly, respond promptly to unsubscribe requests and complaints about spammy emails, keep an eye on your email reputation, and always test marketing emails before sending.
Get Whitelisted for Improved Deliverability
Another method to improve deliverability is to ensure you are included on the world’s biggest whitelist. This whitelist is kept by Return Path, and you must get certified with them to be included on the list. Once you are accepted by Return Path, you will receive a certificate that designates you as a “Certified Sender”.
Whitelisting brings several benefits. First, it ensures your marketing emails won’t get caught in a spam filter. Second, it means that the images in your emails will be shown as standard, so the recipient doesn’t have to give permission for the images to load. And third, all the links you include in your email will be clickable. They won’t be accidentally filtered by an email program that is trying to protect the recipient from spam and viruses.
In short, personalisation and deliverability are two important methods that can help you to achieve better results from your email marketing campaigns. But put the two together, and you end up with a much stronger combination, capable of far-reaching effects.