People receive hundreds of email messages every single day. So how can you make your emails stand out to encourage them to open your messages and engage with your brand?

The answer is email personalization.

A personalized email improves click rates by 14% and conversions by 10%. This means that if you aren’t personalizing your email messages, you’re likely missing out on new leads and customers.

In this post, we’ll look at why email personalization is so important, as well as nine tips for creating personalized email messages.

Let’s get started!

What is email personalization?

Personalized email marketing is when you use information you already know about a specific subscriber and use that information to tailor the email specifically for that individual. Examples of information you could use to personalize the email include name, age, geo-information, last page visited, last product purchased, and more!

Why is email personalization important?

With email marketing, you can connect directly with your target audience. But sending the emails is only half the battle. You want recipients to open and interact with your email messages, and personalization can help.

Personalization is extremely important if you want to encourage interaction with your emails. In fact, 74% of marketers say personalized messages increase customer engagement.

With personalized email marketing, you can:

• Increase the chance that people will open and click your emails
• Tailor your communication to recipients’ individual needs
• Improve customer experience and earn more conversions

Ultimately, email personalization allows you to earn more opens and clicks, and it increases the chance that people will purchase your products.

Okay, you get it. Email personalization is important. But how can you start creating more personalized emails?

9 tips for personalizing your emails

Here are nine of the top email personalization tips to help you connect and engage more subscribers.

1. Ask questions in your sign-up forms

Before we dive into some specific tips for personalizing your emails, we need to look at where the information comes from that we use to personalize.

You want to gather the right information from prospects to begin personalizing emails, and including questions in your sign-up forms is a great place to start.

Now, it’s important that you don’t overwhelm visitors with multiple, in-depth questions. This can scare them away before they even submit the form and join your email list.

However, you can include simple questions in your email sign-up forms that will give more insight into your new leads’ interests and needs. For example, if you’re a digital marketing company, you can ask people to select the services they are interested in, as well as their monthly budget.

Then, you can begin personalizing emails for your clients that have information related to the service and price range that best fits their needs.

2. Send surveys

While you want to avoid bombarding subscribers with surveys immediately after they sign up for your emails, you can use surveys sparingly to gather new data from your subscribers.

For example, you can include a survey as the final step of a welcome email sequence. In the survey, you can ask recipients information about the kind of content they want to see in your newsletters and what time of day they want to receive your messages.

This will allow you to segment your email subscribers and send personalized emails they want to read.

3. Analyze previous email data

Examining previous email campaigns can also help you gather important information for personalizing your emails.

For example, you can identify the types of content your subscribers like best — do they like informational content, promotional content, or something in between? You can also look at the most popular send times for your campaigns.

This will allow you to create personalized emails that resonate with subscribers and specific customer segments.

4. Address recipients by their names

In the words of Destiny’s Child, “Say my name, say my name.”

This tip is the most basic rule of email personalization, and it should go without saying.

Instead of starting your email messages with a generic “Hey there,” you can address your recipients by their names.

Email platforms like MyEmailFX make it extremely easy for you to personalize your emails by adding recipients’ names. Just make sure that you always add a fallback value and test your emails to avoid the awkward blunder of calling someone by the wrong name.

While it’s important to personalize your emails with the recipient’s name, there are many other personalization strategies that go beyond first name personalization.

5. Schedule emails to send in recipient’s time zones

Scheduling your emails to send in a recipient’s time zone is another powerful and extremely simple way to personalize your emails.

If your company is based in New York City but you send emails to clients in London, you could schedule your emails to send at 7 p.m. your time. But this means that they would arrive in your clients’ inboxes at midnight.

To personalize your messages, you can schedule them to send in your recipients’ time zones. Email platforms like MyEmailFX make offer time zone sending features to help you personalize your emails, boost your open rates, and ultimately get more from your email strategy.

6. Use dynamic content

With dynamic content, you can personalize blocks of your email content to resonate with individual recipients. In other words, it allows you to display different content to different people who view your emails.

For example, I received an email from Expedia after booking a flight from Philadelphia. The email invited me to check out “super low fares” from Philly. But Expedia likely uses dynamic content to personalize the top portion of the email to encourage people to view flights from their nearest airport.

The great part? You don’t have to create multiple campaigns to use dynamic content. MyEmailFX allows you to create a single campaign that uses dynamic content to show different messages to subscribers.

7. Link to personalized landing pages

This brings me to the next point. You’ll also want to link your email campaigns to personalized landing pages.

When I click the link in the above email to “See Philadelphia Fares,” I expect to see a landing page that highlights flights from Philly. If the button said, “See Minneapolis Fares,” recipients could land on a page detailing flights from Minneapolis.

Just like you want to personalize content in your emails, you will also need to connect your emails with personalized landing pages so that when recipients click the CTAs and links in your email, they will arrive on landing pages that are tailored specifically to their needs. This can encourage people to purchase and help you boost conversion rates.

8. Integrate your email with other key platforms

Connecting your email platform with other sources of data like your CRM and ecommerce platform allows you to create rich subscriber profiles and send more personalized emails.

For example, integrating your email with other platforms will help you access demographic data and purchase history so that you can create personalized messages based on demographics and past behavior on your site.

You can even use purchase behavior data to send emails with related product recommendations.

After purchasing some new shelves from Etsy, I received a confirmation email that contained additional items from the shop that I might want to buy. And now I really want that macramé hanging shelf to display my plant babies. Email personalization works!

9. Automate your email strategy

With automated emails, you can send the right emails to the right people at the right times.

You can set your automated emails to trigger when recipients take a certain action or your site, reach new milestones with your rewards program, renew services with your company, and more.

Automated emails are a great form of personalization that allows you to send recipients information that is highly targeted and most relevant to them. This helps you better engage customers and provide them with the information to purchase or re-purchase if they are an existing customer.

Hilton Hotel sends automated emails when guests reach new tiers in their rewards program. Clearly, I need to book a vacay pronto to make it to gold status. This PA winter has got me craving some warmer weather and a tropical destination!

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WebFX is a top email marketing company

We get it. You’re extremely busy running your business (or maybe you’re escaping the winter weather with a tropical getaway).

If personalizing your email messages seems like a daunting task, don’t worry! WebFX offers custom email marketing plans to help you reach your target audience with personalized messages, delivered straight to their inboxes.

When you work with WebFX, we’ll help you A/B test your emails, manage subscribers, and help you get the greatest possible ROI from your email campaigns.

Feel free to check out our email marketing plans to learn more!