Personalized Emails
Discover the Benefits of Sending Personalized Emails
As you know, internet marketing experts are always trying to make their promotional campaigns as effective as possible. They use various “tricks” to do that. From powerful copywriting and “magic” words that persuade people to buy to widely used marketing strategies like offering discounts or using limited time offers. You may not know it, but there’s one simple strategy that can significantly boost the response rate of your campaigns. And that is personalization.
Personalization has been used in direct marketing for many years. Companies realized long time ago that personalization works and people tend to respond better to such mailings. Before email, direct mail experts thought that it would be a great idea to create mailings with a personal touch. So employees were sitting all day long and writing every customer’s name into the piece of mailing. As a matter of fact, the same thing still happens these days, because it’s hard to automate handwriting…
Email marketing caught up with this trend and internet marketers also started using personalized emails in their campaigns.
However, in email marketing, it’s different. You don’t have to sit all day long for weeks writing every subscriber’s name into every email you send. Software let’s you automate this process easily. You simply put a form on your site that lets visitors enter their name, last name, email or anything else; and when you need to send out an email message, you just need to include one variable (like [first_name] or smth. similar) and every subscriber gets personalized email.
Mistakes of Personalized Emails
Sometimes marketers make mistakes while trying to personalize their email campaigns. Some of rookie mistakes are addressed here:
- Asking a visitor for a bunch of information might be a mistake. If you want your subscribers to enter about 5 or more fields (email, firs and last name, address, city, occupation etc.) it might seem time consuming and your subscription rate can be very low unless you offer extremely useful product or information that visitors desperately need.
- Another mistake people make when they’re not careful. Many times marketers send an email message that looks like this:
Dear {FIRST_NAME},…
This not only looks unprofessional, but also makes people aware of your further mailings. Some people don’t even realize that it’s an automated email. Some subscribers assume that if they get an email with their name, then the owner probably has written it by herself. So when they see such unprofessional message, they might not trust you anymore. So keep this in mind when crafting a message. Be careful and put in the exact variable of a name that is given in your autoresponder software or service. Better send one test mailing to yourself and see how it looks so you don’t make any mistakes.
- Third mistake that marketers sometimes make is not trying to catch people’s personal details in advance. They simply put email address field for people to subscribe and nothing more. This is of course very convenient for people, because they just need to input one field. However, when later marketers decide that they want to personalize their email, it’s too late. The last thing they can do is create another list and send a message to the existing list asking people to re-subscribe. So think in advance if you’d like to offer personalized emails or not.
Why Personalizing is Important?
In short personalized emails are important, because in many cases they increase your conversions. The longer answer would be that by personalizing an email message you create a relationship between your and your prospect. You tell the prospect that you know him, so he feels more comfortable reading your information.
Another benefit is that by making a personalized email, you differentiate yourself from spammers. When people see their name in a subject line or in the email message, they know that it’s sent by someone who knows them, so it can’t be spam.
Some however, disagree. Some marketers believe that email personalizing automatically creates a sign of promotional message. As long as almost every online marketer uses personalized emails these days, a reader might assume that it’s another sales pitch in their inbox and delete it. An argument of such marketers’ is that none of their friends or relatives will send them en email with their name inside the message. They say that those who know them, know their name and they don’t need to use it in emails. That might be true in some cases.
However, people who give their names and email addresses to you will trust you and show the interest in your subject and what you do. So if they trust you enough to give you their email address, first or last name and are interested in the information you provide, then there’s no reason for them to ignore your emails. If you send one sales pitch after another, then even without personalization your subscribers might go away. But those who think you’re an authority, are ready to pay for any information you provide to them and stay on your list.
In Conclusion
As you see, there are different opinions about personalized emails. Some say it’s a red flag for subscribers and they’ll delete your email if they see their name in it. Others say that personalization is the way to go. But you know what? You shouldn’t listen to any of these statements. What you should do is simply test for yourself. If people respond better without personalization, then don’t use it. If subscribers prefer personalized emails, then use personalization.
You can only find out what works by testing for yourself. And don’t be frightened if people will send you angry emails saying that you shouldn’t include their name in your emails. Such people always exist. Simply delete them from your list or use other techniques to deal with angry subscribers. But one thing to remember is that only testing can show you what works and what doesn’t.