5 Secrets on implementing hyper-personalization in email marketing
The concept of hyper-personalization is all about tailoring your marketing efforts to suit the needs and expectations of individual customers. When you implement hyper-personalization correctly, you can make your brand stand out in the competitive market. This can be of immense benefit when you combine and implement this strategy in your email marketing campaigns. After all, your email sales funnel can be a major source of lead acquisition and retention. Here, we’ll consider 5 secrets to implementing hyper-personalization in email marketing.
What is hyper-personalization?
Hyper personalization in marketing combines behavioural and real-time data extracted from multiple channels and touchpoints, for brands to create an extremely customized marketing strategy. This allows them to tailor products, services, and advertising content to each consumer for maximum relevance and conversion potential:
Regarding hyper-personalization in email marketing, you can first understand user preferences, behaviours, and demographics. Then, you can create emails that resonate with your targeted audience on a personal level.
Personalization vs. hyper-personalization, what’s the difference?
Traditional personalization usually involves using a customer’s name, location, or purchase history to build a connection with audiences. However, we’ve gone past the days when including a first name in the opening line of an email is enough. Improved engagements demand that a higher heightened level of personalization whereby products, messaging, and marketing tactics must be tailored to individual preferences.
With hyper-personalization, you take advantage of advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning to present customized and relevant offers and experiences to individual users.
Furthermore, hyper-personalization factors in real-time behavioural data such as browsing and hones in on audience needs and preferences. It also dives deeper than general customer data. For example, hyper-personalization may include optimized ads based on social media activity, location, and time in its process whereas personalization may not go to that extent.
Likewise, personalization may only involve including first names in the subject line of emails whereas, hyper-personalization may involve sending an email to advertise a special sale on a product that a user browsed on without making a purchase. This can be done as early as 20 minutes after the browsing activity.
Why you should hyper-personalize your campaigns
Brands today make it a priority to deliver the best customer experience through engaging and relevant content. A major way for you to do the same is to tailor your every product and service as well as every customer interaction to meet the needs of customers. The more genuinely authentic they see your brand, the more they will trust and patronize it.
To put the importance of personalization into context, up to 98% of marketers consider personalization to be of help in improving customer relationships while 74% of them agree that it offers a strong impact.
Think about it; would you prefer a standard interaction if you are transacting with a brand or you would go with one that provided an outstanding customer experience? A major reason why brands monitor user behaviour is so that they can use data-driven insights to create accurate customer profiles and present personalized digital experiences that connect with their customers on a deeper and individual level.
Here are some reasons why your customers will connect better with you when you hyper-personalize your content to match their interests:
- They will feel that your brand cares about and understands them
- Your service will be more convenient for them because you already anticipate their needs. For example, with hyper-personalized content, they do not need so many clicks to convert
- Addressing customers by name in emails and messages makes them feel valued as a person
- They feel special and the content feels exclusively made for them. This makes tend to make a purchase decision and make a return purchase
Related: 10 email marketing best practices from experts to increase campaign conversion rates
5 Hyper-personalization secrets for email marketing
You may already realize the power of hyper-personalization, but it may take more than that to implement it effectively in your email marketing campaigns. Read on to learn 5 secrets to implementing hyper-personalization in email marketing.
1. Be thorough and strategic
You should be thorough in your hyper-personalization strategy in order to get the best results from it. Here are the major components of hyper-personalization that you should consider:
1. Data collection
Hyper-personalization begins with data so collect the right type and quality of data. This is because the quality of data can influence the levels of segmentation you can include and how personalized your offers can be. You can use the behavioral analysis stage of hyper-personalization to collect and analyze data on user behavior. Then, you can create personalized user profiles and get your content to the right eyes and make it more likely for them to engage with it.
2. Tailored offers (personalized segmentation)
The process of segmentation entails the division of the email list using specific criteria such as engagement level and purchase history.
You can begin with a simple personalization such as age or gender. Thereafter, you can include segments such as repeat customers for certain products. In this way, you can build upon previous customer interactions with your brand when you make offers in hyper-personalized messages.
Likewise, with segmented email marketing, you can first categorize your email list according to customer preferences. Then, you can make sure to only use relevant content that is likely to appeal to their interest.
3. Personalized marketing messaging
It is usually more effective to send contextualized emails. For instance, you can consider different email copies using content that changes based on real-time pricing, location or time of opening the email, and cart abandonment emails.
You can also create email templates using dynamic content blocks that tend to change according to user profile or behaviour.
Learn how to create shareable content and run a viral marketing campaign
4. Optimal delivery timing
It can be a ton of work to manually sort through vast amounts of data and then create countless messages. Rather, you may explore the use of predictive analytics together with an automated marketing platform. In this way, you can determine optimal delivery times for specific messages and conversion goals.
Another use case of predictive analysis is being able to anticipate user needs and preferences. In this way, some emails may recommend products and others may remind users of abandoned shopping carts.
5. Consistent multivariate testing
In the first place, the use of A/B testing can help you to refine your personalization. Here, you will be sending two slightly tweaked copies of personalized content to a single customer segment. However, multivariate testing will involve multiple distinctions in the tweaks that you make on the copies.
It is important to be able to identify what elements of your messaging are the most compelling and that is where multivariate testing comes in. You will be doing more than simple A/B testing to determine the best performing combinations of multiple elements including headlines, images, and copy.
At the end of the day, you can check metrics such as click-through rate and conversion rate to compare outcomes and make iterative improvements.
2. Personalize content for the buyer’s journey
Your email marketing campaign is more successful when you engage your audience at every touchpoint. The use of email automation tools in combination with AI-driven tools can be useful for different stages of the buyer’s journey.
- You will be better able to identify similar audience segments and drive them to the next conversion level.
- For instance, with predictive scoring, you can anticipate the next move in an individual customer’s journey with your brand. Then you can personalize the email content for them.
- You can also personalize your email content for various personas and even nurture at-risk subscribers.
- It is possible to build personal connections with customers and generate revenue at the same time. For example, you can include accompanying discount offers with “Happy Birthday” emails.
- Note that personalized offers can influence the loyalty of up to 65% of consumers. You can therefore design loyalty programs and related messages to create a sense of exclusivity.
Learn 6 ways to optimize marketing strategies for enhanced customer experience
3. Leverage the power of AI
Yes, AI can do more than contribute to automation and personalize content for different stages and audience segments of the customer journey. You can use AI to customize user interfaces and make them fluid and adaptable and instead of relying on manual marketing personalization.
Read up on how to use AI for marketing automation
4. Use the right tools to implement hyper-personalization
One of the reasons why hyper-personalization is so effective is that you can use certain tools to gain insights into your email campaign strategy. For instance, you can find out what aspects of your strategy deliver the best ROI. You can also spot market trends even as they develop.
You have to get as much data on your subscribers as you can. However, you need to ensure that you use the right hyper-personalization tools. You can use tools such as Google Analytics, CRM software, ERP project management tools, and email marketing platforms to get data on their demographics, past interactions, or browsing behavior.
Your chosen hyper-personalization tools will collate real-time data from multiple sources such as customer feedback, sales and marketing data, and HR feedback.
Meanwhile a well-implemented ERP project management tool can take your hyper-personalization process a step further by collecting critical data relating to sales and marketing, inventory, and finances.
5. Use multi-channel marketing
You can take your hyper-personalization strategy up a notch by combining consumer data with multi-channel marketing. It becomes easier to take advantage of various customization levels when you create individual relationships with users according to multiple channels such as Email, social media, websites, and smartphones.
Keep customers engaged with email hyper-personalization
Virtually every business will want to use every strategy that is effective to stay competitive. Hyper-personalization in email marketing happens to provide important benefits such as driving higher engagement and boosting ROIs. These 5 secrets on implementing hyper personalization in email marketing can help you achieve your marketing goals. Being thorough in data collection, segmentation, and dynamic content are some of the tricks to it. When you ensure that you constantly refine your strategy, you can be more confident of getting good results.
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