How to personalize email marketing messages for better results

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There’s no more effective way to increase email campaign opens and improve your email marketing results than by segmenting your list and sending personalized content to each segment. The data proves it.

Research from Mailchimp found that list segmentation can increase open rates by 14% and click-through rates by more than 100%. A separate study by SmarterHQ found that Millennials’ brand loyalty improves by 28% when they receive personalized email marketing messages.

Those are just a few stats proving that list segmentation and personalization work, and savvy marketers know it. Research from Mailjet and Ascend2 found that marketers rank personalization as the second most important element to improve to make email Increase engagement (59%), just behind content quality (64%). In other words, personalization might not help you get better email marketing results if the quality of the content in your messages isn’t good enough.

How personalization and list segmentation work together

The goal of list segmentation and personalization is to make each recipient feel like the message you’re sending was written just for them. I can’t stress enough how important this is to the success of your email marketing investments. Consider the following as evidence…

Did you know that the average person receives more than 100 email messages every day? How many of these messages do you think each person actually opens and reads? How many do they delete without opening or mark as spam? Think about how you deal with the email messages you receive every day. What do you do with most of the email messages you receive every day?

The reality is that most people don’t open all of these messages, and each unopened message can harm your domain reputation (aka sender reputation) and the future deliverability of your email marketing messages. Email service providers like Google, Outlook, and Apple Mail just want email marketers to send messages that people actually want.

When recipients don’t open your messages, don’t mark them as spam, or block you as a sender, this negative engagement shows email service providers that you’re not sending content people want. In other words, you don’t take the time to segment your lists and personalize the content of your messages to make it as relevant as possible to recipients. Instead, send generic messages and hope someone replies positively.

To learn more about domain reputation and deliverability, follow the links below for full details:

What does it all mean? It’s easy. When you segment your lists and personalize the content of the messages you send to be as relevant as possible to each segmented audience, here’s what happens:

• Positive engagement with your messages will increase.
• Negative engagement will go down.
• Email service providers will think you’re a good sender.
• Your domain reputation stays high.
• Your messages will continue to end up in inboxes, not spam.
• Your email marketing results will improve.
• You will achieve your email marketing goals.

Personalization is more than a name

Yes, you can personalize email messages by adding the recipient’s name to the subject line and/or greeting in the message, but that’s so 1990s. To get better results, you need to dive into your data and find more ways to personalize the content you send.

Demographic Personalization

You can segment your lists and personalize the content of your message for a niche audience using the demographics you have about them. For business-to-business (B2B) email marketing, this could include location, type of business, role of the recipient in the business, etc.

For example, imagine you are sending a message to market your nutrients to cannabis growers. Knowing that different states have different laws on whether cannabis can be grown indoors or outdoors, as well as seasonal differences, it might make sense to tailor the content of your message based on the license holder’s location and the type of growing environment they operate personalize .

Email Marketing Tip for Cannabis License Holders: When you use the Cannabiz Media License Database to send email marketing messages to licensed cannabis companies, you have access to a significant amount of data that can be used for demographic list segmentation and content personalization. For example, you can segment and personalize by license type (cultivator, manufacturer, dispensary, etc.), location (e.g. country, state, county, zip code, etc.), canopy size, role, license status, segmentation, and personalization. growth environment and more.

behavioral personalization

Review the behavioral data you’ve collected about your audience. How have they engaged with your email messages in the past? What messages have you opened? Which links did they click? These behaviors give you lots of information about their interests, issues, and priorities that you can use to send more relevant content in the future.

If you use UTM codes and Google Analytics to track behavior beyond clicking the link in your message (e.g. what people do on your website after the link in your message takes them there), you can still Gather more information about what your target audience is interested in. Use this information to increase the relevance of your future messages and your results will increase significantly.

To put behavioral personalization into practice, imagine you plan to send a campaign to cannabis dispensaries across the United States to promote your security system products. As you’ve nurtured your audience over time, you can look back at their interactions with your previous messages to determine what content to send them in your new message.

Use the open and click data for your previous messages to find out if certain topics didn’t resonate with certain recipients (ie, they didn’t open the messages on those topics). If so, you don’t want to keep sending them new messages on the same topics. Find the messages that motivated them to open and click. Those are the topics you want to focus on in your future messages. Segment your list based on topic engagement using past campaign open and click data, and personalize future message content accordingly.

Email Marketing Tip for Cannabis License Holders: When you use the Cannabiz Media License Database to send email marketing messages to licensed cannabis companies, you can drill down to recipient and link levels for metrics like opens and clicks. Use this data to create segmented audiences based on behaviors and send personalized messages to each niche group in the future for the best results.

Key takeaways on personalizing email marketing

Personalization improves email marketing results. So before you send out an email marketing campaign, ask yourself will every person on the list who will receive them be happy about it? Is there someone on your list who will not be happy? Are there ways to change the content of your message to make it more relevant to them?

Your goal should be to only send content that people want, and the way to achieve that is by segmenting your lists and personalizing your messages.

Would you like to learn how to use the Cannabiz Media License Database to engage with cannabis and hemp license holders for sales and marketing, including email marketing? Schedule a demo and see how a subscription can help you achieve your goals.