Our Vice President of Growth, Kelly Grover teamed up with Angie Wiemen, Product Marketing Manager at Litmus, an email marketing solution to build, test, and analyze email performance, to host an informative webinar discussion around the topic of email personalization.  

Here we share some of the key takeaways from the webinar. We invite you to view the full webinar here.  

Personalization is a must

Litmus research shows that marketers know there’s an urgent need for personalization. More than half of marketers are making personalization a priority, and 59% of them are focusing on automation to help make that happen.   

More than ever marketers are turning to email as part of their overarching marketing plan. The Litmus state of the email report found that marketers have a 70% higher reliance on email. With an average ROI for email being 36 to one, it’s not surprising that marketers rely on email as their go-to connection point with customers. But with more emphasis on emails, comes increased competition for subscriber attention. So, marketers need to prioritize perfecting that personalization piece. If it’s done right, email personalization can help maximize the success of email marketing and boost ROI.  

Subscribers expect personalization  

Today’s subscribers are holding marketers to a much higher standard. A study from Demand Gen reported that 76% of buyers expect personalization because they want to build trust and a relationship with the brand marketing to them. If that isn’t compelling enough, consider that 83% of customers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience. This is good news, but it’s important to look at the strategy behind the personalization and pinpoint when it can add value to the customer experience.   

Personalization: Level 1 (good)  

The first step to personalization is journey mapping, understanding your customer journey and where they’re at today and where you want to take them. If we start with the basics at level 1, these are things like geolocation personalization that you can do without having a data feed or a product catalog. For example, using weather to show there’s a chance of rain so here are some rain boots in case it does. You could also use their location when the email is opened.  Tell them that there is a nearby store and give them quick directions to get there along with surrounding landmarks. Or, a countdown timer, which counts down to the end of a sale. One of the more basic things is using their first name in the greeting. Doing this makes a subscriber feel more connected with the brand. The last one is social content. You’ve got great social content—videos, images—so go ahead and put that live feed right in the email. It will help with real-time relevancy. 

Personalization: Level 2 (better)  

Level 2 is where you bring in the CRM data. This is going to be personalization tactics that do require data feeds and more advanced CRM data. This level looks at previous purchase history and makes recommendations based on it. You could also use reviews to get a product in front of a potential customer. If you have an app, you can tap into the in-app loyalty behaviors by pointing out new things you’ve added since the last time they were in the app. Level 2 personalization can give subscribers more personalized stats. The big thing to keep in mind with this approach is that you must make sure that you're marrying the correct data together and are speaking in a way that’s going to be relevant and authentic because the last thing you want to do is to create a negative experience.  

Advanced personalization: Level 3 (best)  

With level 3 personalization, you rely on AI-driven product and behavior signals to drive recommendations. Let’s use this as an example: The customer has bought a mattress. Now you want to share some other products that are related to a mattress like a pillow or a mattress protector. These recommendations have the potential to resonate with subscribers because you’re giving them content that they didn't even know they wanted but might need. Relying on AI for predictive recommendations is critical when you’re thinking about effective personalization at scale. Data sources from website interactions like most viewed products or most purchased can also help to drive FOMO. AI helps to extract customer insights like motivations and that enables marketers to automate the process of collecting relevant data and targeting offers for greater engagement and providing even more value to your customer.  

Personalization in action 

Litmus customer, Blue Sea Holidays, used Litmus to increase customer engagement through their unique click through rate. It increased by 133% because they used a combination of not only behavioral data— how the customer was interacting with the site with geotargeting— to match the right travel offer to the right email subscriber. Customers didn't just click through, they also converted. Blue Sea saw a 35% increase in bookings and an almost 17% uptick in their gross profits based on using that combination. 

Email personalization is about making the subscriber feel like the email was handcrafted specifically for them. To scale it, test and optimize how the emails are performing so you can take personalization a step further and level up 1,2,3. Contact us to discuss how you can level up your email personalization today.