Email Marketing today is becoming less and less about promoting your products/services and discounts and more about personalizing your subscriber’s experience to serve their wants and needs. When your subscribers receive an email personalized to them, they are more likely to engage with it. Starting with the subject line down to the message itself. The subject line is the first thing they see, so of course, that needs to be personable. This is why businesses have an entire marketing team dedicated to promotional email offers to make sure they send emails that are targeted and relevant to subscribers.
According to Invesp, “Compared to non-personalized mailings, personalized promotional mailings have 29% higher unique open rates and 41% higher unique click rates”. If you’re a business and you send emails, you already know the need for personalization. Everyone is doing it, so is it even special anymore? Are your customers paying attention to their first name in the subject line? There’s a way for marketers to take it a step further. Hyper-Personalization.
Email Hyper-Personalization
A Hyper-Personalized campaign uses purchasing, browsing, and real-time behavioral data from multiple channels to target content, products, and services for each subscriber. The meaning for a hyper-personalized email campaign is to increase the opportunities a marketer has to target specific content that fits each and every customer’s wants and needs. The more data you gather and analyze the better the opportunities.
For example, Johnny was searching the web on his mobile device for a new hoodie for the fall and winter season during his lunch break at noon, at a local coffee shop. He purchased an Adidas branded hoodie online in September. The personalization would be an email sent to him maybe including his name, and hoodies like and similar to what he was searching for in a fall/winter merchandise campaign.
The hyper-personalization is taking the same advertisement but one-upping it with advertisements based on the device he was using, location of the purchase, the time of the purchase, his payment method, and his social media related activity with the Adidas hoodie. So now you can send an email campaign out to Johnny knowing he takes his lunch break at noon, at a coffee shop, and he is interested in Adidas hoodies for the fall months, and also known to keep the email mobile-friendly.
Traditional personalization uses something called a profiling technique in order to make assumptions about their subscribers based on certain traits, which allow the marketer to target messaging, services, or products based on these specific traits. This is simply not detailed enough, marketers are now moving towards this new method.
Hyper-personalization is more involved and more effective, it goes above and beyond the customer data. Marketers can take the data and use hyper-personalization to target for future shopping experiences based on a simple website click, or an advertisement engagement, or which coupons have been used during purchase.
If you want to add on to hyper-personalization another great tactic to use to communicate with your customers is having a corporate account on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to help with any challenging task your customers may need help with.
Mobile Friendly
Another thought to keep in mind is mobile views. According to godot.com, “Almost 68% of your customers are right now accessing your website via a mobile device. A recent study has shown that 58% of the users have used mobile applications to open marketing emails as compared to the feeble 16%, who have accessed their email through desktop”. What exactly is mobile friendly? It’s an email that can display between both desktop, laptop and mobile devices to ensure that it will look great regardless of where the customer is reading it. If your site is not mobile-friendly it’s likely you will get the unsubscribe. Gone are the days where people are using desktops to open your emails, we are now living in the day where our emails are at our fingertips.
So how can you make your emails mobile-friendly? Take a look at these 5 simple ways:
- Single column templates
Using a single column template can be easier for viewers rather than a two-column template. Why? If you’re using two columns your viewers will most likely have to scroll and zoom to read your content. This can cause issues for the viewers to find your call to action.
2. One clear call to action
Include one call to action and keep it near the top of your email. If you’re creating multiple calls to actions it may complicate the user. Be straightforward and tell your readers where you want them to go. The call to action should be a button or a link, so make sure it’s easy to find and easy to click on.
3. Simple design and content
Clear message and simple design are the best way to go for any email marketing campaign, especially when your readers are viewing on a mobile device. Keep the design clean and focus on the call to action.
4. Don’t overuse images
Images in an email should follow the one to three rule, any more than that are unnecessary. Only use images that make the most sense to your email. Another topic to take into consideration is that a few mobile devices such as Android, turn off images by default. So you must be prepared for some audiences to not even see your images. If you’re adding too many pictures, and your email does not display them, your email will have a lot of white spaces. Then your email will not look professional on a desktop or even mobile view. We highly recommend including descriptions to your images to let your audience know what the pictures are about if it not displayed.
5. Avoid small fonts
Small fonts are a no-no. Your audience is most likely reading on a smaller mobile device, so why try to make it complicated for them? We recommend keeping your font body size 14pt and 21pt for your headlines.
In conclusion
2018 was truly an ice breaker for hyper-personalization. Now that 2019 is here, you will see more and more email marketers making their transition from basic personalization to hyper-personalization. Whether a shopping cart reminder or a welcome email you must ensure that the email goes out to the correct person at the right time.
Lastly, Email Marketers hyper-personalization may now just be moving out of the new stages, but Multi-Method Email Hygiene hasn’t. It’s great to personalize and be prepared for mobile views, but your campaigns will not succeed if they aren’t reaching your subscriber’s inboxes. Be sure to send your list through Webbula’s Multi-Method Email Hygiene before you send out your campaigns. If you don’t you could be hit with hidden threats like spam traps, bots, moles and more. Or worse, end up on a blacklist, and we don’t want that.
In need of customer data? Webbula can help fill in the missing pieces of your customer data. Learn more about our Data Appends service.
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