Personalization in email marketing is the act of targeting an email campaign to a certain subscriber. We personalize emails to build a conversational tone with the customer. It is done by leveraging the data and information you have about them. It can be information like their first name, the last product they purchased, where they live, etc.

1. Gather suitable information

The first step to personalize your emails is to find out more about your customers. To deliver appropriate content, you need to know who your customers are, and how to most effectively serve them. And, what’s the simplest way to find out this information? While you don’t want to ask a lot of information that overwhelms your recipients, you can choose a couple of specific questions that will help you better serve your customers.

2. Segment your lists

Once you’ve collected all your data, you can then divide your contacts into buckets. You can segregate your contacts into a variety of segments, including demographics, customer type, and location.

3. Create quality over quantity content

Be aware of how many segments your recipients are included in at one time. You don’t want to overwhelm your recipients with too many emails or overwhelm yourself with various segments to manage! Test what emails and segments your recipients answer best to in stages so you don’t overflow the inbox.

4. Be careful of the creep factor

Personalizing your emails may be a wonderful strategy. But a number of the emails come through in the inbox immediately after viewing an item. That level of speed is unsettling! therefore the subject lines are like, “We saw you looking…” or, “We noticed you clicked on …..”

Privacy concerns should be kept in mind while personalizing. Give a while and space between someone viewing an item and sending an email. Let the web cookie dust settle.

5. Don’t stop at the name

While we personalize emails, many of us think of including our recipient’s name in the greeting of the email. While this is clearly an aspect of personalization (and a good start!), it’s just one element of the many. Since a lot of companies use this tactic in their emails, name substitution has become a regular place. You’ll need more than your recipients’ names to actually get their attention.

6. Focus on behavior

One of the simplest ways to personalize emails is to focus on the behavior of your recipients. For recipients who are heavily engaged, partly engaged, or not at all engaged, build up automated nurtures. This is a very supportive way of organizing your email campaigns. It makes sure you reach those who are focused on what you have to offer.