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Ashok Sharma
Ashok Sharma

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Maximize Engagement with Technology-First Email Personalization

Personalization is one of the most important marketing tactics of the last few decades. Although seemingly simple, creating content that directly appeals to a specific audience allows them to easily relate to it, driving interaction and enhancing the return of marketing campaigns.

Of the various studies that have focused on the importance of marketing personalization, McKinsey’s statement that companies that grow faster drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization is perhaps the most striking.

Simply by directly addressing people by name, recommending products or services that fit their needs, and writing in a tone that’s appropriate for them, businesses can generate more profit. One area of marketing where personalization comes in handy is email marketing. In an email, the recipient already expects a high level of personalization as you’re writing directly to them.

In this article, we’ll dive into the skill of personalization, demonstrating the technology that businesses can leverage to make deeply personalized emails – and, with them, reaching higher profit rates – a breeze.

Let’s dive right in.

Why Does Personalization Matter in Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a high-ROI marketing channel. That said, every team under the sun is concentrating on it, meaning you need every advantage possible to make sure your content stands out from the crowd.

Personalization is an effective way of making your customers feel seen. When you receive an email that has clearly been mass-produced, it instantly removes any desire to read it. An email without any personalization simply converts the recipient into “just another customer” for a business.

Customers want to feel valued. Customers want to feel like your business appreciates the fact that they shop with you. Personalization helps your organization create lasting relationships with your clients. Instead of treating them just like anyone else, you focus on small things that set them apart.

From recommending certain products based on their location to sending gift coupons via email to celebrate their 1-year anniversary with your company, everything helps set you apart from your competitors.

Personalization is a highly effective tactic – but it's also the least a company can do to truly start to value its customers.

How Businesses Can Leverage Technology to Enhance Personalization

Generating profit through personalization is one of the primary reasons for focusing on this marketing strategy. However, alongside profit, email marketing campaigns that use personalization will also help to build trust with your audience, enhance your credibility, and improve your brand reputation.

The degree to which you personalize content depends on your resources. Of course, you can’t write a unique email for 1,000,000 individual customers. While this still remains fairly true, there are numerous technologies that your business can leverage to enhance your personalization without consuming more resources.

Here are the top technologies you should know about to enhance email marketing personalization.

Email Signature Technology

Great personalization doesn’t always have to be customer-focused. While this statement may seem counter-intuitive, an increasing number of customers are looking to hop with companies that seem human-run. Instead of a large corporation, customers want to construct a relationship with the people they’re interacting with.

With that in mind, another effective way of enhancing personalization in marketing emails is to use an email signature. Email signatures are small additions to marketing emails, often displaying contact information, a name, and maybe even a picture. These personal elements show a customer that you’re not just a faceless corporation – you’re an active company that has real employees working there.

You can use an email signature template generator to rapidly create a template that your entire organization can follow. Whenever you send out a marketing email, your customers will see that it is coming from a real person. This touch of personalization on your company’s side of the email is often overlooked – but can be an incredibly powerful way of boosting your credibility.

Customer Relationship Management Platforms

CRM platforms allow businesses to build up a centralized database of information on each of their customers. Everything from the customer’s contact details to when they first interacted with your site will exist in a CRM, making it the perfect place to go when looking to personalize.

Marketing teams will use CRM platforms for numerous activities, including streamlining communication with their audience. However, when it comes to email marketing, they also provide another powerful feature: audience segmentation.

Inside your CRM tool of choice, your business can segment your audience into several smaller groups. Instead of then having to create email content for your whole customer base, you can create more detailed emails that hit home for a smaller group of people.

Email marketing with customer segmentation technology is a powerful way of enhancing levels of personalization. You don’t need to create generic content that everyone can relate to. On the contrary, you can use this to create hyper-specific emails that only that segment will enjoy.

This is one of the most impactful ways of enhancing personalization, with teams using it in email and other forms of marketing.

Artificial Intelligence Technology

AI technology has been one of the central talking points in the world of marketing for the past year. With the rise of highly-accessible generative AI tools, seemingly every team around the world has found a use or two for AI in their marketing department.

While the copy that AI produces is extremely cliche and generic, that doesn’t mean it can’t have other uses in marketing. When you already have an email template that you want to use, a powerful way of enhancing personalization is to craft customized emails with AI.

Connecting up your CRM to an AI tool will allow you to feed it information about each customer. Based on their name, location, or any other features that you wanted to highlight in the email, you can then use AI to rapidly generate highly-personalized email en-masse.

While your marketing team will have to spend time checking these for inconsistencies or errors, this can be a great way of scaling personalization in marketing without breaking the bank.

Final Thoughts

At this point in 2024, the vast majority of marketing teams will already understand the need to personalize and the various benefits that it can bring to campaigns. However, understanding how impactful something is doesn’t directly translate into being able to effectively create personalized content.

By leveraging the technology suggested on this list, organizations will be able to craft deeply personalized emails. Enhancing email personalization by using technology will allow marketing teams to create content faster while achieving higher degrees of personalization.

Best of luck creating winning email campaigns in 2024!

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