Why Personalisation & Dynamic Content is Key to Email Marketing

 Once-up on-a-time personalisation for an email marketing campaign consisted of “Dear [First Name]” but with more and more companies now sending regular email updates to their consumers, this is no longer enough. Usability studies have found that the inbox is an even tougher environment than the Internet when it comes to consumers skimming over content and ignoring the bulk of it.

Email marketing has become much smarter, personalisation isn’t just about using names it’s about tailored content, which that individual will want to see, based on their demographic, behaviour and even their purchase history. Welcome to the world of Dynamic Content!

As well as the usual field contents, dynamic content tags let you display different content to different people based on who they are and what they like. With this technique you will be able to create highly targeted, relevant information to all your different subscribers within one single email campaign. Research is constantly proving that target marketing tends to yield significantly better results with relevant emails driving 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails (Jupiter Research). It has also been found that leads that are nurtured with targeted content produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities (Annuitas Group).

This powerful technique, when used correctly can help you to significantly improve your campaign; but be warned – out of date preferences could be your downfall, such as if are a chain of restaurants and your subscriber moves home, the offers you are sending may no longer be relevant. To avoid these pitfalls, make sure to include an update section in all your emails so your users can keep receiving relevant information personal to them.

According to Aberdeen Group, personalised emails can help to improve click-through rates by 14% and conversions by 10% so why would you not experiment with these in your email marketing campaign?

So, where to begin? Start by asking how you can improve potential customers’ time on your site with your email. What information will catch the attention of each subscriber? Use your database to generate ideas and use every opportunity to build up your database with more information without a lengthy form before your potential subscriber can even sign up to receive your first email. Give a little with a welcome email and then offer your new reader to select his or her own preferences. This can be done in a simple online form where subscribers are able to tick which categories they are interested in such the industry they work in. Thus, letting them know that you do not want to clutter their inbox, you understand they are busy and you want to understand what their needs are to provide only useful information to them.

By using Amazon’s recommendation engine as an example, it is clear to see how this method can help you improve your conversions; as with every targeted email that you get right, your readers will begin to trust that what you are sending directly to them is relevant. Your subscribers will be more inclined to open and better yet, read the information you are sending and drive more traffic to your site, which if you are an ecommerce brand, is more likely to lead to a sale than a generic newsletter.

But dynamic content is not just useful to retailers; any industry will have consumers who will have individual requirements and areas of interest, such as us here at Klood. We are using dynamic content to provide the updates that our readers will want to see in their inbox. For example, an SEO consultant may not want to hear the latest news from Facebook and so by using dynamic content, we are able to adapt our newsletter templates to show only relevant blogs and news to each of our subscribers.

Any well-executed email campaign will need to involve a level of adaptive content to provide the best results for any business. Have you experimented with dynamic content yet?