DID YOU KNOW: 74% OF MARKETERS SAY TARGETED PERSONALISATION INCREASES CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT?
Email marketing can be one of the most powerful tools when it comes to getting more sales for your small business. The biggest problem is that most small businesses do not understand how powerful it can be to personalise emails and without the touch of personalisation, you could be missing out on a lot of engagement and new, or repeat customers.
I have spent the last 8 years building an email database, which now has over 10,000 small businesses and the one thing I have learnt is the importance of personalisation. It’s all well and good me telling you this, but without factual evidence that this is the case, you might find it hard to believe.
Email provider Mailjet ran a study just last month which revealed that UK internet users believe that personalised emails are the best way to get them to click on a user’s. As you can see below, 38.9% of 16-29 year olds said that personalisation was the second most important attribute that would make them click on an email. This percentage grows to 39.6% for 30-44 year olds, and to 42.9% for 45-59 year olds. Averaging out the below attributes, personalisation scores the highest with an average of 40.2%.
With that in mind, personalisation is critical and if you don’t know how to do this, I am going to share 3 tips on how to personalise your emails to get more sales. The 3 tips I am going to share as based around using an email marketing tool called Mailchimp. For a small business, Mailchimp is the best marketing software, as it is free to use up till 2,000 users and has amazing features. If you are using a different tool; don’t worry. What I am going to share can be applied to any email marketing tool as long as you have an automation feature available.
1. PERSONALISE EMAILS BASED ON A SCORING SYSTEM
Email automation in particular, should run itself. This however cannot happen unless you have a lead scoring system in place that defines certain behaviours or demographics. You can “score” your leads however you like, but to be descriptive, use terms like “prospect”, “warm”, “hot”, “buying customer”.
Mapping this will allow you to have control over what each user will receive from you in terms of your email marketing. Base your model on the above, and the demographics (interests, gender, age, location) and their behaviour (attended a webinar, attended a talk).
Mailchimp does allow you to do this, and you can find out exactly how to score your leads here.
2. MERGE TAGS
A merge tag inside of Mailchimp is an algorithm that takes a piece of personal data from a user inside of Mailchimp, giving you a nice way to personalise an email you send. For example; I will use the first name merge tag in the subject line of an email I send. It will look something like “Come and meet me at [TRADESHOW], Name!”. Inserting the merge tag will take the first name of your contact, and slot it into whenever you use that piece of code.
For a merge tag to work, you are going to have to collect the personal data when doing lead generation. I will always ask for a first name, and email address on any sign up forms I use as I know this is what I need for my merge tag, and to personalise my email communication.
3. INTEGRATE YOUR EMAIL TOOL WITH YOUR LEAD GENERATION TOOL
This is really important for me, as I have a lot of lead generation content. I offer different downloads, strategies, courses and other types of content as a free download, in exchange for a name and email address. To make this run smoothly, I integrate my email marketing tool (mailchimp) with my lead generation tool (instapages) so that as soon as someone downloads for example, my 6 step social media lead generation strategy, they then go into the automation funnel which is already set up, and they receive the series of emails relating to what they signed up for.
I hope you now see the importance of personalisation and automation to get more sales through your email marketing.
How do you personalise your email marketing?
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