With more data come greater responsibilities. This is not only true when it comes to legal compliance, it's also a crucial point when prospecting and talking to clients.
Imagine misgendering a prospect or inverting their first and last name… This might seem like a drop in the ocean, but it can really alter the state of your prospecting and even tarnish your reputation.
Unfortunately, most customers report that despite a growing use of personal data by companies (like Facebook for instance), their experience lacks personalization. This often leads to their disinterest in your company, and to your engagement rates plummeting.
But fear not, we lift the veil on one of the best practices around: email personalization.
What is email personalization?
Definition of email personalization
In marketing, email personalization means using customer data to tailor email messages to each customer.
When you're consenting to the use of cookies on a company's website or signing up for a newsletter, you actually agree to share your behaviour (name, email address, time spent on a page, purchase history, etc.) In turn, companies can use these data to address you and your preferences directly.
💡Data consent is essential to comply with the GDPR
Email personalization can range from a simple direct address in the opening line of the email (using your first name for instance), to sending you a follow-up email if you didn't complete an order, to adapting the content of emails to your location.
Examples of email personalization
If the concept is still blurry, we've got a few examples of email personalization to help you visualize what you can achieve to engage with your customer base.
- Updates
Sending carefully crafted updates to your clients and prospects can help you remind them how you're constantly striving to improve your product. You can directly address them ("Hi/Hello + Name) and then detail your most recent features and how they can help with their pain points.
This is a simple way to personalize email and draw attention to your product.
- Reminders
Reminders go one step further in terms of email personalization: they not only address recipients directly but they are also useful for both you and your prospect, since you can precisely inform them on the state of their subscription or of their trial period.
Reminders let you keep track of your customer's funnel journey, while also warning them about what they're missing out. A call to action often goes together with email reminders, so that you increase your chances of converting prospects into clients.
- Follow-up email
Tracking your customer's behaviour doesn't have to be creepy. Instead, it can help you interact with them and create a custom experience of your product for them.
By letting them know about a specific feature or by offering help with their first steps in the use of your solution, you'll not only demonstrate your dedication to customer service but you will also showcase how you're particularly invested in their own use of the product.
Why should you personalize your emails?
Now that you understand better what email personalization looks like, you might wonder why it's necessary to adopt this method.
As Email personalization can have different forms, its driving principle is threefold.
1) Building strong customer relationships
Salesforce latest State of the Connected Customer Report has shown that most customers would give access to more of their data if that meant companies would tailor their experience to their preferences.
With Email personalization, you're make sure that you're addressing your clients' specific needs and, more importantly, that they're not just another number on your list. Marketing personalization means emphasizing the value you give to each and every customer.
As regards B2B relationships, email personalization also plays a crucial role: you don't want to hand-in your business liaisons to a bot. Instead, becoming a trusted advisor for other companies and adding human value to operations can be a real game-changer. 👊
2) Skyrocketing rates
With personalized emails, you can not only boost your email opening rate - making sure your audience is at least interested by your subject line (more on that below 👇) - but you can also raise your click-to-open-rate (CTOR): by suggesting custom content and offers to your recipients, you are necessarily generating sales opportunities.
3) Raising your ROI
As a marketer or a salesperson, emails are your go-to prospecting weapon. The only thing is that poor email quality can result in disastrous results for your prospecting campaigns and, therefore, for your total revenue.
Properly using personalized content and, more precisely, personalized emails can help you reach a 43:1 ROI - you'll not only maximize your number of customers, but you'll also make sure they want to engage with your product.
How can you personalize your emails?
Now that we've sang the praises of email personalization, it's time to get down to the actual method.
Preliminary steps
But before diving into writing, email personalization requires you to have a reliable contact list and clear targets: the goal of email personalization is to drive sales. Sending your latest updates to a void email address or prospecting outside of your market will defeat the purpose of email personalization.
- Segmentation
Segmentation can help you tailor your messaging by sorting out your contact list based on a number of factors.
You can first create your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), with specific details about their occupation, their location, their industry… anything that seems relevant to your company and your product.
You can then use a lead generation tool like Pharow to help you figure out who might fit the description of your ICP. Good news is, Pharow is integrated with Dropcontact. In one single app, you can:
1) Define your ICP
2) Have a list of relevant people
3) Directly enrich the data found by Pharow
- Enrichment
Good email personalization needs contact details to properly work its magic. But don't worry, it doesn't need to be complicated.
Dropcontact allows you to upload your contact list (under a .xls, .txt or .svg file) directly on its platform to enrich in just a few minutes.
Gender, job occupation, current company, LinkedIn profile… You name it! Every relevant piece of information is added to your file so you can focus on email personalization. No more misgendering your prospects or confusing their first and last name: you can entirely rely on the new information provided by Dropcontact.
Even better, the solution is integrated with your favorite CRM (Pipedrive, Hubspot and (very soon) Salesforce).
- Clean data
On top of providing you with the information you're missing, Dropcontact also cleans and updates your contact data in real-time. That way, you'll avoid misspelling your prospect's name or reminding them of their previous jobs. By keeping in touch with their professional and lead journey, you'll be better equipped to write custom emails to answer their needs and pain points. We told you, it's like magic 🪄
Secondary steps
Now that you have all the data you need to send your personalized emails, it's time to write them!
- Now that you can filter out undesired Cold Emails on Gmail, it might be hard to have your email end up in the inbox of your recipient. To avoid that, personalized subject lines are the way to go: forget about templates and imagine that you're writing to a single person to whom you must absolutely talk.
- Remember the enriched data you got with Dropcontact? Now it's time to use it by tailoring your address with the right gender and name. Of course if you have a lot of prospects to contact, it might be tedious to do it all manually. Some cold emailing tools use liquid language to help you with this, like Quickmail.
- To write your email, remember to check the data in your possession to see how your solution might answer your prospect's issues: this is why templates won't necessarily help you with the content of your email. Instead, you can rely on the AIDA method (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) to personalize emails like a pro (not familiar with it? 👉 we got you)
- Last but not least, a short conversion path will go a long way to drive your sales: carefully crafting your landing pages and designing optimized thank-you pages, as well as enticing CTAs will definitely give prominence to your personalization and customer care skills.
Final steps
You're almost ready to go! There are a few more elements that you can add to your email personalization routine to make sure its optimal:
- A/B testing: this will help you improve your email rates and see what kind of messages better resonate with your prospects. CRMs like Hubspot for instance have a dedicated A/B testing tool to compare different email contents.
- ⚠️Customer consent and privacy: email personalization is great, but it can be easy to wander in the quagmire of data privacy when building your contact list and emailing your prospects. It is crucial to:
- know the origin of your contact data (to fully comply with the GDPR, it can't come from a stored databases or have been bought on the dark web);
- make sure your prospects have consented to share their social and behavioural data;
- always have an option for them to opt out of data-sharing.
You're now all set to become a true rock-star of email personalization!
