5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
white paper:
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line a publication from
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
Introduction While digital marketers are accelerating customer experience and
So, what are the email personalization secrets that are driving increased
personalization initiatives on their websites, email, for the most part, is
revenue? What are marketers experiencing industry-leading growth doing
being left behind.
to outperform their email marketing colleagues?
Many marketers are still using batch and blast tactics for their emails and
The answer is simple: they’re taking email personalization beyond the
are often limited in their personalization efforts to merging data fields, such
subject line.
as name and company, that are available in their Customer Relationship Managament (CRM) systems. And that’s a missed opportunity. Consider this: Less than 1% of customers say that a subject line that includes their first name is the tactic that gets them to open a message. And 66% contend that poorly personalized emails are annoying because
82
the marketer’s attempts are “superficial.” But marketers who use implicitly provided information—such as customer intent and behavioral histories—when sending emails are resonating with customers and creating lifts in revenue. And these tactics work: 82% of shoppers say they would buy more items from a brand if their emails were more personalized, according to a Harris Interactive survey.
a monetate white paper | 3
%
of shoppers say they would buy more items from a brand if they received more personalized emails.
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
1. Use Geo-Targeting to Meet Your Customers in Real Time Geo-targeting your customers at the time they actually open an email adds real-time context to your message. But if you’re only collecting customer information online, you’re likely missing key data for localization efforts. Solve that problem by capturing and using a customer’s IP address, wifi location, or GPS coordinates at the time your customer opens your email. True Religion Brand Jeans recently aced this tactic when it ran a regionalized campaign to drive in-store traffic in specific markets and promote a new line of jeans. The luxury jeans brand used geo-targeted open-time email to promote a discount for those customers who visited select stores and tried on a pair of jeans. The result was a 1% lift in in-store conversion rate and thousands of dollars in incremental revenure, figures True Religion Director of Global Ecommerce Gary Penn called “really, really amazing.”
a monetate white paper | 4
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
2. Create Connections by Signing Emails Unless you’re emailing a bunch of machines, your customers are people who respond to human interaction. Don’t send a completely personless email that just asks someone to “click here.” Instead, write your emails as if you were having a face-to-face conversation with the customer. That means being friendly, yes, but it also means sending emails from an account manager’s email address (or a customer’s other point of contact at your company) to strengthen the customer’s personal connection to your brand. Use the information you know about your customer to make the conversation more relevant.
At Monetate, our Content Marketing team uses a “thank you” email to further engage those who download our content resources. We write the email in the first person and route all replies directly to our team members’ inboxes.
a monetate white paper | 5
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
3. Optimize Your Emails for Inside and Outside the Inbox Most conversions don’t happen within an email, and customers are likely to best remember the last touchpoint they had with your brand. Because of that, today’s email design needs to be as much about the initial message as it is about the landing page. And both those items need to be optimized for any device type. Marketers who are creating a seamless experience—regardless of device—are doing so by starting with the mobile experience first. From there, they can tweak the experience depending on device and maintain message consistency—or “scent trail”—throughout the website visit to remind customers why they’re visiting and what you’re offering them. Furniture store West Elm checked both these boxes in a recent campaign that promoted a sale, and pushed customers to explore the company’s “Design Lab” product. Though both sale call-to-actions drove customers to the relevant product results page, the Design Lab product landing page was different depending on the device: mobile users could explore previously designed spaces, while desktop users could sign up for the service.
a monetate white paper | 6
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
If your landing page isn’t optimized for all device types, you’ll need to redirect users somewhere useful and relevant. West Elm did just that, sending users to device-specific landing pages to maintain a good user experience.
a monetate white paper | 7
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
4. Mine Customer History to Create Better Context If you’re planning to increase your email marketing efforts over the next year, you’re likely focused on creating more content. But marketers who send the most relevant emails place as much emphasis on context as they do content. Context requires a deeper level of customer understanding, forcing you to pay attention to the many ways your customers interact with your brand. The key is to ask the following questions:
• How has this customer interacted with us in the past? • What are the customer’s interests? • Is the customer at home or work? On a mobile, tablet or desktop? This data is as equally powerful for marketers with high send rates as it is for marketers with lower send rates. J.Crew Factory, for example, illustrates how easy this can be by targeting women and men with gender-specific models, clothes and accessories.
a monetate white paper | 8
Join Our Mailing List! email JOIN
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
These J.Crew Factory emails show the big impact a simple data set can have on personalization. Changing the creative based on purchase history creates a more—dare we say—tailored experience.
a monetate white paper | 9
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
5. Serve Dynamic, Open-Time Content to Stay Relevant If you’re an email marketer, you know your email doesn’t necessarily get read the moment you hit send. So how do you insulate yourself from sending emails that will be out of date by the time your customers open it? The key is to create a tactical plan around your recipient’s actions instead of your own—and use dynamic, open-time content. If you’re making a limited-time offer, make sure you have the ability to dynamically change the content once the offer expires. Similarly, plan to swap out images of promoted goods, just in case you sell out, or run low on stock. Having the ability to automate these dynamic changes will save you time and eliminate what could otherwise be a poor customer experience. And if you want to motivate your customers to book that trip they’ve been considering—or you’ve been pushing—inspire them to do it by comparing their dismal in-the-moment weather situation with the great weather forecast of their destination location.
Ever dream of a tropical vacation during a snowstore? Us, too. The travel industry knows that, and its best marketers capitalize on it.
a monetate white paper | 10
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
Personalize your abandonment emails with dynamic content.
Open-time content can also be based on time of day.
Someone in rainy Seattle may still book that last-minute trip to the Grand Canyon if they know it’ll be sunny.
This example, sent at night, reiterates that an agent is available to answer booking questions.
a monetate white paper | 11
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
About Monetate The Monetate Acceleration Cloud lets marketers understand their
Monetate generates billions of dollars of new revenue for businesses,
customers’ situations, behaviors, and preferences, and act on those insights
helping them grow 39% faster than the industry average. Brands such as
with in-the-moment, relevant experiences, targeted to the right customer
Best Buy, National Geographic, and Celebrity Cruises rely on Monetate to
at the right time. The Monetate Acceleration Cloud runs above traditional
put the customer first, creating stronger relationships that drive sustained
infrastructure and is accessed through one seamless user interface.
competitive advantage.
a monetate white paper | 12
Expert Optimization Resources Valuable case studies, eBooks, white papers, webinars & infographics monetate.com/resources
Request a Demo Call 877-MONETATE (US) | +44 207 099 2101 (EMEA) | 484-323-6313 (everywhere else) demo.monetate.com
monetate.com
monetate.com/facebook
monetate.com/twitter
US Sales & Service
EMEA Sales & Service
Call 877-MONETATE (US)
+44 207 099 2101
monetate.com/linkedin
©2013 Monetate Inc. All Rights Reserved
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line a publication from
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
Introduction While digital marketers are accelerating customer experience and
So, what are the email personalization secrets that are driving increased
personalization initiatives on their websites, email, for the most part, is
revenue? What are marketers experiencing industry-leading growth doing
being left behind.
to outperform their email marketing colleagues?
Many marketers are still using batch and blast tactics for their emails and
The answer is simple: they’re taking email personalization beyond the
are often limited in their personalization efforts to merging data fields, such
subject line.
as name and company, that are available in their Customer Relationship Managament (CRM) systems. And that’s a missed opportunity. Consider this: Less than 1% of customers say that a subject line that includes their first name is the tactic that gets them to open a message. And 66% contend that poorly personalized emails are annoying because
82
the marketer’s attempts are “superficial.” But marketers who use implicitly provided information—such as customer intent and behavioral histories—when sending emails are resonating with customers and creating lifts in revenue. And these tactics work: 82% of shoppers say they would buy more items from a brand if their emails were more personalized, according to a Harris Interactive survey.
a monetate white paper | 3
%
of shoppers say they would buy more items from a brand if they received more personalized emails.
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
1. Use Geo-Targeting to Meet Your Customers in Real Time Geo-targeting your customers at the time they actually open an email adds real-time context to your message. But if you’re only collecting customer information online, you’re likely missing key data for localization efforts. Solve that problem by capturing and using a customer’s IP address, wifi location, or GPS coordinates at the time your customer opens your email. True Religion Brand Jeans recently aced this tactic when it ran a regionalized campaign to drive in-store traffic in specific markets and promote a new line of jeans. The luxury jeans brand used geo-targeted open-time email to promote a discount for those customers who visited select stores and tried on a pair of jeans. The result was a 1% lift in in-store conversion rate and thousands of dollars in incremental revenure, figures True Religion Director of Global Ecommerce Gary Penn called “really, really amazing.”
a monetate white paper | 4
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
2. Create Connections by Signing Emails Unless you’re emailing a bunch of machines, your customers are people who respond to human interaction. Don’t send a completely personless email that just asks someone to “click here.” Instead, write your emails as if you were having a face-to-face conversation with the customer. That means being friendly, yes, but it also means sending emails from an account manager’s email address (or a customer’s other point of contact at your company) to strengthen the customer’s personal connection to your brand. Use the information you know about your customer to make the conversation more relevant.
At Monetate, our Content Marketing team uses a “thank you” email to further engage those who download our content resources. We write the email in the first person and route all replies directly to our team members’ inboxes.
a monetate white paper | 5
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
3. Optimize Your Emails for Inside and Outside the Inbox Most conversions don’t happen within an email, and customers are likely to best remember the last touchpoint they had with your brand. Because of that, today’s email design needs to be as much about the initial message as it is about the landing page. And both those items need to be optimized for any device type. Marketers who are creating a seamless experience—regardless of device—are doing so by starting with the mobile experience first. From there, they can tweak the experience depending on device and maintain message consistency—or “scent trail”—throughout the website visit to remind customers why they’re visiting and what you’re offering them. Furniture store West Elm checked both these boxes in a recent campaign that promoted a sale, and pushed customers to explore the company’s “Design Lab” product. Though both sale call-to-actions drove customers to the relevant product results page, the Design Lab product landing page was different depending on the device: mobile users could explore previously designed spaces, while desktop users could sign up for the service.
a monetate white paper | 6
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
If your landing page isn’t optimized for all device types, you’ll need to redirect users somewhere useful and relevant. West Elm did just that, sending users to device-specific landing pages to maintain a good user experience.
a monetate white paper | 7
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
4. Mine Customer History to Create Better Context If you’re planning to increase your email marketing efforts over the next year, you’re likely focused on creating more content. But marketers who send the most relevant emails place as much emphasis on context as they do content. Context requires a deeper level of customer understanding, forcing you to pay attention to the many ways your customers interact with your brand. The key is to ask the following questions:
• How has this customer interacted with us in the past? • What are the customer’s interests? • Is the customer at home or work? On a mobile, tablet or desktop? This data is as equally powerful for marketers with high send rates as it is for marketers with lower send rates. J.Crew Factory, for example, illustrates how easy this can be by targeting women and men with gender-specific models, clothes and accessories.
a monetate white paper | 8
Join Our Mailing List! email JOIN
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
These J.Crew Factory emails show the big impact a simple data set can have on personalization. Changing the creative based on purchase history creates a more—dare we say—tailored experience.
a monetate white paper | 9
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
5. Serve Dynamic, Open-Time Content to Stay Relevant If you’re an email marketer, you know your email doesn’t necessarily get read the moment you hit send. So how do you insulate yourself from sending emails that will be out of date by the time your customers open it? The key is to create a tactical plan around your recipient’s actions instead of your own—and use dynamic, open-time content. If you’re making a limited-time offer, make sure you have the ability to dynamically change the content once the offer expires. Similarly, plan to swap out images of promoted goods, just in case you sell out, or run low on stock. Having the ability to automate these dynamic changes will save you time and eliminate what could otherwise be a poor customer experience. And if you want to motivate your customers to book that trip they’ve been considering—or you’ve been pushing—inspire them to do it by comparing their dismal in-the-moment weather situation with the great weather forecast of their destination location.
Ever dream of a tropical vacation during a snowstore? Us, too. The travel industry knows that, and its best marketers capitalize on it.
a monetate white paper | 10
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
Personalize your abandonment emails with dynamic content.
Open-time content can also be based on time of day.
Someone in rainy Seattle may still book that last-minute trip to the Grand Canyon if they know it’ll be sunny.
This example, sent at night, reiterates that an agent is available to answer booking questions.
a monetate white paper | 11
5 Ways to Personalize Email Beyond the Subject Line
About Monetate The Monetate Acceleration Cloud lets marketers understand their
Monetate generates billions of dollars of new revenue for businesses,
customers’ situations, behaviors, and preferences, and act on those insights
helping them grow 39% faster than the industry average. Brands such as
with in-the-moment, relevant experiences, targeted to the right customer
Best Buy, National Geographic, and Celebrity Cruises rely on Monetate to
at the right time. The Monetate Acceleration Cloud runs above traditional
put the customer first, creating stronger relationships that drive sustained
infrastructure and is accessed through one seamless user interface.
competitive advantage.
a monetate white paper | 12
Expert Optimization Resources Valuable case studies, eBooks, white papers, webinars & infographics monetate.com/resources
Request a Demo Call 877-MONETATE (US) | +44 207 099 2101 (EMEA) | 484-323-6313 (everywhere else) demo.monetate.com
monetate.com
monetate.com/facebook
monetate.com/twitter
US Sales & Service
EMEA Sales & Service
Call 877-MONETATE (US)
+44 207 099 2101
monetate.com/linkedin
©2013 Monetate Inc. All Rights Reserved
