Six Ways that You Can Personalize Your Emails

Carl Taylor | June 29, 2020

Generic emails just don’t cut it anymore. If you want your prospects to respond, you need a more personal touch.

We’re sure that you’ve left the generic cold email behind long ago.

Everybody knows that sending out a generic email to your entire list is a sure way to get zero responses.

So if you’re going to get your prospects to pay attention, you need to personalise your emails. And you’re likely already doing that… To an extent.

You insert the recipient’s name at the top of the email, like everybody else. And… That’s it.

But in today’s marketing world, that’s not enough to make your emails stand out. You need to take personalisation a step further to create the most effective email campaigns possible.

Your potential clients don’t want to see that you know their names. They want to see that you understand them. And that you recognise their problems and know what they need from you.

So, are you ready to take personalisation of your emails to the next level?

In this article, we’ll look at some of the more advanced email personalisation techniques that you can leverage today.

Technique #1 – Pose Relevant Questions

As we said in the intro, your readers want to see that you understand them.

What better way to do that than to confront their specific problems directly?

By posing questions related to their problems, you show the reader that they aren’t getting a generic email. Instead, they’re getting something that you’ve tailored specifically for them.

Now, the challenge here is that you don’t always know the exact problems that somebody has when they join your list. But again, posing questions is the solution here.

This can start on your landing page. As part of your form, you could provide the prospect with a list of potential issues that they want to work on. The answer tells you which email campaign to insert them into.

And from there, you can kick off your emails with questions that relate to the problem they highlighted.

Automation Agency can help you develop such forms for your landing page. We can also help you to segment your list based on the responses, which will help you to send more relevant emails. Get in touch with our Concierge Service to learn more.

Technique #2 – Use Behaviour-Triggered Emails

Let’s say that a potential prospect visited your website. They navigated through a list of products until they found something that sparked their interest. So, they add that product to a shopping cart and start the checkout process…

But then, they have a change of heart. They abandon the cart at the final moment and you lose out on the sale.

It’s a common cause of mini-heartbreak for many a business owner. But this is also a perfect example of the sort of behavioural trigger that you could take advantage of when personalising emails.

This prospect just told you which product they’re most interested in. That means they’ve also clued you in on their potential challenges.
This is all data that you can use to personalise the emails you send to them.

Such personalisation could be as simple as reminding them that they have a product in their cart. Or, it can be as in-depth as discussing their decision not to buy and prompting them to tell you what they’re looking for.

This is just one example of a behavioural trigger. Your prospects will provide you with plenty more as they go through your funnel. Learn what they are and create emails that trigger when the appropriate behaviour takes place.

Again, Automation Agency can help you with this. Work with our Concierge Service to create personalised campaigns based on pre-selected triggers.

Technique #3 – Track What Your Prospects Read

Building from the previous point, what your prospects read on your website can also help you to personalise emails. Your blog is a great source of data in this respect.

For example, let’s say that you’re a coach who provides services to personal trainers. A prospect arrives on your website and spends several minutes on a specific blog post:

The 10 Things That Prevent You from Scaling Your Personal Fitness Business

This prospect’s reading choice just told you that they want to scale their business. It also tells you that they’re having trouble doing it, likely due to one of the reasons in your article.

Now, you have a perfect opportunity to follow up with them. You could refer back to the first technique and ask a question about which point of the article related most to them. You can even offer further reading materials that expand on the blog post.

This is all personalised email content that nurtures the prospect. That means they’re more likely to read what you send, as well as more likely to say yes when you make your offer.

Technique #4 – Allow Subscribers to Choose What They Receive from You

As mentioned, every prospect comes to you with a specific problem. However, you likely provide solutions to multiple problems in your business.

That means there’s a chance that you’re sending irrelevant content to some of your prospects. And the fact that these emails offer little value means that they’re likely to start ignoring you.

This is where allowing your subscribers to choose what they receive from you can help.

First, your subscriber inserts themselves into a relevant audience segment with their choice. That means you don’t have to do any work to find out about their problems.

Second, you’re making the prospect an active participant in the process. The fact that they get to choose means they feel confident that you’re going to provide value. Of course, you need to repay that confidence with relevant email content in the following weeks and months.

This is another thing that you could add to your landing page forms. Contact our Concierge Service if you need help with this.

Technique #5 – Schedule Emails Based on the Recipient’s Time Zone

Let’s assume that you operate out of Sydney. However, you have clients in the United Kingdom. You send out an email to one of your audience segments at 2pm local time.

Your clients in Australia all receive that email at about the same time, give or take an hour.

Your clients in the UK receive the email at 3am.

They’re not awake to read that email. And by the time they get around to checking their emails, you might find that yours got buried under a ton of others.

That’s a situation that you want to avoid.

As such, it’s worth segmenting your list further based on the time zones of the recipients. This allows you to ensure your email lands in a prospect’s inbox at a time that’s convenient to them.

For added effectiveness, put some time into researching your prospects’ emailing habits. Find out when they’re most active on their email clients and schedule your emails to reach them at those times.

Technique #6 – Create Customer Personas

So far, we’ve looked at using your prospects’ behaviours as triggers for emails. We’ve also looked at how you can ask questions to learn more about prospects.

Now, it’s time to take a bigger step.

As your email list grows, it will generate tons of data. This data will then reveal certain patterns in customer behaviour. And among these, you’ll find that groups of prospects engage in specific actions regularly.

This is information that you can use to create customer personas. These commonalities in actions tell you that a segment of your audience all want the same thing.

Now, you just need to separate that audience segment from the rest and create campaigns designed specifically for it.

Keep in mind that you won’t personalise these emails in the sense of responding to the specific issues of a single prospect. However, you will send relevant content based on the persona that the prospect fits into.

It’s likely that your business has several customer personas for you to leverage. Examine the data to figure out what your prospects look like. Then, create tailored campaigns for each individual persona.

It’s So Much More Than Just a Name

Using a prospect’s name is the most basic level of personalisation there is. After all, every single person on your lists expects you to do it.

What they may not expect is for you to deliver valuable and relevant content to them via your emails.

The techniques shared here show you how to figure out what your prospects want from your business. After that, it’s up to you to make sure they receive it.

Thankfully, Automation Agency can help you in several ways. We can work with you to segment your list and create automated email campaigns. Plus, we can work on the forms you use on your landing pages.

Get in touch with the Concierge Service to get started.

And if you’re not yet a member, head to our Right Fit Chatbot to learn if we’re a good fit for you.

About the author 

Carl Taylor

Carl Taylor is the Founder & CEO of Automation Agency. For the past 10 years Carl has been building businesses and marketing them online through the use of Sales Funnels, Email Marketing Automation, Landing Pages, and Wordpress Websites. Carl is also a #1 author and highly sought after speaker and consultant whose work has impacted thousands of businesses across various industries worldwide.

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