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If you sell to everyone, you’ll sell to no one.
I don’t know if that’s a famous saying or not, but if it isn’t, then it darn well should be.
Bland messaging aimed to attract everyone possible is one of the surest ways to struggle in growing your eCommerce revenue.
That’s why every blog that covers marketing topics highlight the importance of personalizing your messaging to the person you’re sending it to.
Studies back this up, showing that personalized offers tend to deliver anywhere from 5-8X the ROI. That’s a 400% revenue boost!
And thanks to leaps and jumps in recent technology, we’re now able to not only personalize our marketing messaging — we can hyper-personalize it.
What is that, you say?
Great question! We’re going to cover what that is, why it’s important, and how to do it with your email marketing right below.
What is Hyper-Personalization Anyway?
In the realms of email marketing, hyper-personalization is essentially better personalization that can genuinely offer a more one-to-one feel.
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Where general, basic email personalization comes from using demographic data and basic segmentation.
Hyper-personalized email marketing is built on a foundation of that same data. It also collects vital real-time and/or behavior-based data that can then be used to customize messaging to tailor to each personal customer journey.
Phew, that’s a mouthful!
Imagine…
Having email marketing automation software robust enough to follow all the website behavior and email engagement activity for all of your contacts and then to have the capacity to use that to personalize messaging on autopilot.
That’s what we’re talking about here.
And with the right strategy and toolset, you can do this for your brand.
Need a bit more convincing?
We got you.
//[inject:ad-demo]
Why You Should Hyper-Personalize Your Brands Email Marketing Strategy and 3 Steps To Get You Started
No matter how old we get, marketers like you and I will always be a bit like a 3-year-old whose parents are trying to convince them to try broccoli, and we ask, “But why?”
We tend to be skeptical of things we’ve never tried because time is money, and using up our time on the wrong stuff could mean less money to our brand or company.
I get it, cuz. I get it.
So let’s get down to brass tacks.
The fact of the matter is, personalization affects revenue. The less personalization there is, the lower the revenue becomes.
That has been proven here, here, here and in about a thousand other studies that are too many to number.
Just look at some of these hard numbers as laid out by Instapage:
- “When messages and subject lines are personalized, emails have an average open rate of 5.9% and a click rate of .2%.”
- “When an email is not personalized, 52% of customers say they’ll find somewhere else to go.”
- “Segmented, targeted, and personalized emails generate 58% of all revenue.”
That’s the data.
Personalization does everyone good. Hyper-personalization is just the bigger, better version, meaning it’s going to help you achieve all the results you want (more opens, more clicks, more revenue, etc.) even better.
But what about examples of eCommerce brands using a hyper-personalized email marketing strategy?
There’s quite a few, but the best well-known brand to utilize this is Amazon.
You know, that Amazon.
They utilize a hyper-personalization strategy backed by a robust toolset to help them send very personalized product recommendation emails.
And now, 35% of Amazon’s conversions and revenue come through this one channel. I’m sure we’d all like to steal a page out of Amazon’s playbook and this just so happens to be part of it.
So if you’re ready to double down in the personalization departments, then below you’ll find a few steps to help get you started.
1. Start with Collecting the Right Data: From Opt-In Forms To Website Behavior and Beyond
This starts with your opt-in forms because a lot of your initial demographic data is going to come through this step. As great as it would be to collect a bunch of info here, you don’t want a form that’s as long as your arm.
You’ll want to make sure you get their name and email address, but you can go further here. For instance, when’s their birthday? Would they like to receive SMS texts in exchange for a discount? What are they interested in? (You can place tick boxes for interests). This would give you insight to what kind of content they actually want to receive.
You don’t need to place all of these in one form; you could have different pop-ups to collect various things throughout your site.
You can even have your email sequence set up to collect some of this additional data so that people don’t shy away from your opt-ins.
Collecting data starts here, but it doesn’t end there.
You have a lot of customer behavioral data from the subscriber activity on your website and email too. For instance, a subscriber may click through your email to a product page but then go on to browse other products on your website.
With the right tool (*cough* Sendlane *cough*, *cough*), you can collect all of that behavioral data and turn it into an automation that triggers after they click from your email to the page but don’t purchase. This sort of retargeting is highly personalized to only them and their current activity which is exactly what we’re going for.
2. Utilize Segmentation Strategies To Find Your Buckets Of Interest
When you start to really take the reins of personalizing your email marketing you're quick to learn that segmentation and personalization go hand-in-hand in many ways.
Mixing email segments + behavioral data + marketing automation is like a dream come true for most eCommerce marketers because this is where hyper-personalization meets revenue.
Building segments is rather simple, and there’s a few we recommend to help get you started:
- Loyal Customer segments based on LTV, AOV or Total Revenue. Your best customers tend to be those who buy from you and keep coming back for more. Brand loyalty is a real thing (just check the amount of money on Starbucks and TOMs every year and you’ll believe it!), and segments designed to find these unique customers give you a chance to enhance their experience and keep them coming back for more.
- Segments based on products purchased. We love this one because it’s easy and has a high chance of a return. How so? Because you can use past product purchases info to up-sell or cross-sell other related products to customers. Product recommendations are VERY effective for boosting revenue, and when they’re personalized like this, you’re only helping yourself in this area.
The next step is to use those segments alongside behavior-based automation to ensure that every customer gets a highly tailored customer experience that moves along with their journey.
//[inject:ad-ebook-segmentation]
3. Create Automations Built On Behavior To Personalize Customer Journeys
While segments help you bracket together people with specific interests and purchasing behavior, pairing those segments with a corresponding automation funnel is going to rock the socks off your personalization obsessed brain.
Let's explain how this could look for your subscriber.
They come to your site, make a purchase, and get their order and shipping confirmation emails.
A few days later, their product comes to them in the mail, and they’re happy about it.
Five days after that initial purchase, they then get an email from you saying something like “Hey, I hope you’re enjoying your new XXX. Since you bought X, we thought you might enjoy these products too. ” And then show a few product recommendations below.
They opened the email, but they didn’t click on anything. So, a couple of days later, another email comes with User-generated (UGC) reviews talking about how much other people loved the products you recommended in the previous email.
Seeing this prompts them to make one more purchase from you. And voila, just like that, you’ve turned a one time customer into a repeat customer.
Your customer doesn’t know this, but you designed this because you match their past purchase to a segment that triggered a product recommendation automation sequence that personalized the offer based on their purchase. And part of the automation is designed to send the UGC email only if they didn’t purchase it. Since they converted, the automation ends there instead of sending the other emails you put in the sequence.
After you spend the initial time creating and matching segments to automation funnels, you can sit back and let all of this yummy revenue converting goodness take care of itself.
And as an added bonus, You can even use those automations to automate removing them from the segments they’ve been added to and move them into something else based on what they do!
I know.
It’s a bit mind-boggling, but I promise you that once you get a clear understanding of the potentials here you’ll be able to see really go to work and create flows that add that hyper-personal touch we’re aiming for here.
Test, Measure, and Tweak Your Strategy As Needed
Like any marketing strategy, you have to launch it to test it. Measure the effectiveness of it. And then tweak it as needed.
Hyper-personalized email marketing plans are no different.
Sure, they take a bit more and possibly update your marketing toolset to make things better, but you can definitely reap the rewards here.
Now more than ever, we have to level up our game to stand out in email inboxes and build a great experience that keeps subscribers opening and clicking.
You’re looking for an email marketing platform that can help you easily utilize hyper-personalization email tactics, be sure to give Sendlane a try.
