Most people think that social media and influencer marketing has completely surpassed what email marketing could ever achieve, but they couldn’t be farther from the truth. Email marketing still remains the most effective tool to increase customer lifetime value and increase your sales. The people on your email list have given you a private door into their personal lives, by giving you their email address. It is up to you to use this access to your advantage by respecting their needs and engaging on a personal level. Turns out, an email campaign is 6x more likely to get a click-through than a tweet. Now it’s time for you to learn how to influence sales with Email personalization.
Image via Mindtree
So what is people’s concern with email? Why is the entrepreneurial community flocking to social media and abandoning email in search of greener pastures? One of the main advantages of social media is that it fosters a much more personal relationship with potential clients and customers.
How do we reconcile the potency of social media to foster better relationships and the higher conversions of email marketing? You got it! We use email personalization!
So how do you do this? Here are the 4 top strategies to use to personalize your emails:
1) Use Jokes, Pictures, and Gifs
Grabbing attention works and having a sense of humor is a huge ice-breaker. This one may seem strange but I am more likely to open emails that start with a joke or a funny picture. AppSumo, the multi million dollar business always has a joke in the beginning of every single email they send. It works like magic. I open 99% of their emails, because I know that they will make me laugh.
Image via: Appsumo
Quuu uses this as well. Every single one of their blogs contains a funny gif. Adding humor gives the reader the good-feel factor and entices them open your emails and read your content. Check this out.
Gif via Quuu
2) Use Your Picture and Social Media Links
Most email recipients are more likely to open an email from a person rather than a company. If an email is sent from info@…the likelihood it will be opened is dramatically reduced. People don’t buy products, they buy people. Have you ever heard that? The same is true when it comes to email marketing.
It’s important to have the email be addressed from a humanץ Consider including your picture and your various social media links underneath. What’s even better is if your profile picture is catchy in some way. One of my favorite examples for this is Shane Baker.
If you notice, not only does he have a unique profile picture (he got it from a gig on fiverr) but he also has his Skype and website links next to it, as well as a link to a relevant blog post below. Anywhere I see a panel of social media experts I quickly recognize Shane, his picture always stands out!
3) Perfect Time and Location
Don’t you hate it when you get emails from your favorite brands right in the middle of your work day? You want to open them but you are on your phone on a smoke break and you can’t read it well enough on the phone, and you can’t check your email in the office for fear your manager will breathe down your neck.
This is why every business needs to A/B test sending their emails at different times and create a segment for each location or timezone where their customers live. I am much more likely to open an email after 7 pm let’s say, or in the morning when I wake up.
According to a study by BusyTees, click through rates increased by 11% when they did this. And their sales rose 8% as well. Wow. Such a small tweak could do so much, who would have thought.
4) Set Up Automate Behavioural Triggers
This is by far the most important, brilliant, and diabolical strategy. Let’s say you are LinkedIn, you just launched, and you are waiting on new customers to fill out their profile pages. You could make an automated trigger for when a customer completes their profile they get an email congratulating the on the task, or if a week went by without them doing so they get an email reminder to complete it.
Behavioural emails are a great way to keep your audience engaged and to bring them back to the product or service that you are offering. According to Kissmetrics trigger emails have 152% higher open rates than regular emails.
Recap
Emails have the highest ROI out there, even higher than social media, but we have to keep them personable. If you use our 4 strategies to personalize your emails namely:
1) Use Jokes, Pictures, and Giffs
2) Use Your Picture and Social Media Links
3) Perfect Time and Location
4) Set Up Automate Behavioural Triggers
You will have an incredibly more personable and successful relationship with your customer, boosting click through rates, engagement, and most importantly your sales. We hope you enjoyed all the memes, and until next time:
GoodBye for now
