Email marketing is still king, as it continues to generate the highest ROI for marketers. But, with so many emails flooding your customers’ inboxes today, it’s hard for your content to stand out from the crowd. To increase customer engagement and the return of your email marketing investment, consider personalizing your marketing emails. According to the Aberdeen Group, leveraging the information you have at hand about your customers like their names, their industry, and even their first date of purchase—rather than blasting one-size-fits-all messages to your contact list—helps to increase click-through rates by about 14 percent and conversions by 10 percent. If you’re interested in boosting business by as much as 10 percent, here’s how to get started.
Personalize Your Content with Variable Data
Personalizing your email marketing content increases both the likelihood that the recipient opens the message and that they read the content and engage with your call to action. Start simply by adding your recipient’s name to the email subject line. Using variable data, your email marketing platform will pull each recipient’s first name and add it to the subject line’s text. If you are using Evolved Office’s platform, an example for a lunch and learn email’s subject line is, “Hi ##firstname##! What are you doing next Tuesday?” Why the subject line? According to Marketing Sherpa, personalizing a subject line with your customers’ names increases open rates by over 29 percent. This more than doubles your open rate, as the average is about 22 percent. Other simple options are including each recipient’s name in the salutation and even including other variable data in the body of the message, like their title or company name.
The success of your efforts is determined by the quality of your contact list(s). Collecting and effectively organizing customer contact information is essential for personalization to work. Review and edit your contact list(s) to ensure fields aren’t left blank, or the variable data won’t pull the correct information when prompted. Fortunately, EO’s marketing platform maps each list’s column header, ensuring that using the variable data (like ##firstname##) actually pulls the correct information into the email upon sending. Always send test emails to designated contacts to make sure your email looks exactly the way you want it to before blasting to broader lists.
Personalize Your Content with Target Marketing
Customizing your message for a specific audience, or target marketing, is a bit more complicated than using variable data. However, it provides a significant return on your investment. According to eConsultancy, 74 percent of marketers verify that target marketing increases customer engagement. Moreover, The Direct Marketing Association notes that target marketing efforts generate 58 percent of a company’s revenue, making it a great marketing option if your company wants to increase its revenue (and who doesn’t!).
For the office technology industry, target markets are mostly segmented by industry. Consider dividing your lists into smaller groups based on the vertical markets in which your clients fit, such as legal, education, healthcare, manufacturing, and so forth. You then can tailor your message to each vertical, helping to drive home the benefits of your products and services in a way that is relatable to that specific customer. For example, consider how much more effective a Managed Print Services email would be for healthcare providers if you mention its ability to maintain HIPPA compliance as opposed to painting its broader benefits that are applicable to any industry. It may take a bit of time to set up, but the payoff is worth it.
Whether you start off small by including your customers’ first names in email subject lines or shoot for the moon by segmenting your lists by industry, personalizing emails can make a huge difference in customer engagement and your email marketing ROI. If you need help making personalized email marketing work for you, contact Evolved Office today. We can help you leverage your lists with our industry-specific vertical content, or you can learn more about our rep marketing module, a tool designed to personalize marketing emails with your sales reps’ headshots and individual contact information.