The world of email marketing is forever changing, and to achieve your objectives, you must make your message stand out. Traditionally, that was achieved by sending personalized emails that clients wanted. But today, you have to go beyond that and send emails that customers expect.
To get your recipients to take action, you need to offer one-on-one experience and treat each client individually. The days of segmenting your email list using buyer personas based on demographics like gender, age, or location are past us. It’s no longer enough to provide a personalized experience; you need to make it hyper-personalized.
The difference between personalized and hyper-personalized emails is day and night. The former is tailored to a general customer profile or audience, while the latter is tailored to a specific recipient in your email marketing campaign. Hyper-personalization helps you deliver distinct and individualized messages that make your customers feel more special.
Hyper-personalization has become an essential part of email marketing. All the top brands, including e-commerce giant Amazon, use this strategy to appeal to customers and increase their sales. Consumers, on the other hand, expect it. 91% of customers prefer buying from businesses that provide personalized experiences and recommendations.
This article will explain why you should hyper-personalize your email marketing campaigns and how it can help you build better relationships with your audience.
What is hyper-personalization?
Hyper-personalization involves using real-time data, AI, machine learning, and predictive algorithms to understand your audience at an individual level and act appropriately on that information. In email marketing, hyper-personalization uses purchasing, browsing, and real-time behavioral data from different channels to target content, product, or services to each subscriber individually.
As a marketer, you know how to use the profiling technique of creating buyer personas. It helps you make assumptions about subscribers based on certain traits, allowing you to target your messaging based on them. Hyper-personalization does the same thing but takes it to the next level by using real-time data to communicate information relevant to the customer contextually.
Hyper-personalization leverages behavioral data extracted from multiple channels and touchpoints to create highly personalized emails. It combines the basic personal information of the customer (name, age, purchase and transaction history, location, etc.) with real-time data like browsing history, in-app behavior, web preferences, etc. This combination allows brands to predict individual customers’ demands and send emails that address their specific pain points.
Hyper-personalization is made possible using various software to help you create dynamic and personalized content and track and engage customers. Considering the amount of AI and machine learning that goes into it, you will also need to invest in a cloud platform to store, serve, and process data.
5 reasons to hyper-personalize your email marketing campaigns
Email is still one of the most effective ways of pulling prospects into your sales journey. When someone subscribes to your email list, they’re interested to know more about your business, and they trust you to send them quality emails that they will find beneficial. If you fail to deliver, you will cut their journey short and fail to convert them.
At worst, they will unsubscribe from your newsletter. And if they keep you around, they will stop reading your emails or send you to the spam folder. To avoid this, you must send your subscribers emails tailored to their needs. You should be able to predict their demands using the data they give you. And this can only be possible through hyper-personalization.
With that in mind, Here are five more reasons you should hyper-personalize your email campaigns.
1. Increases your conversion rates and sales
The number one advantage of hyper-personalization is that a company can tell where customers are in their buyer journey. Companies can send contextualized emails directed at a specific individual using data, AI, machine learning, and automation. Hyper-personalization allows you to predict customers’ demands and helps you solve their personal problems.
If you can solve customers’ problems, you can get them to act and convert them. Let’s look at three examples to see how hyper-personalization can help you:
Customer A: This customer browses a product page for five minutes but leaves without taking any action. They either didn’t find what they were looking for or didn’t like what they saw. Using their browsing data, you can send them hyper-personalized emails offering them more education about the product/service they were looking at or a suitable alternative.
Customer B: This customer abandons their cart. They showed interest but quit because they got busy or the total added up to more than expected. Using their data, you can send them an email persuading them to complete the purchase by offering them a discount or free shipping.
Customer C: This customer goes up to the end of the sales funnel but leaves at the checkout stage. They probably quit because they didn’t find their preferred payment option. You can email them asking what payment option they prefer or offer them an incentive (like 5% off) if they use your preferred payment option.
Hyper-personalization lets you know your prospect’s exact problem and predict their expectations. If you do that correctly, the customer will feel seen and heard and return to your website to complete their purchase.
2. Helps you retain customers
Customer acquisition is just the start; for the long-term success of your business, you need to retain clients and build brand loyalty. Hyper-personalization lets you achieve this goal, allowing you to use all the data collected from a customer to keep them engaged with your business.
Hyper-personalization drives loyalty by establishing a strong relationship with a customer. Using a customer’s data, from demographics to purchasing patterns, you can send targeted emails that communicate with your customers individually. By understanding your audience’s behavior and preferences, you can get them to take different actions, from recommending your brand and following you on social media to making another purchase.
The most important way hyper-personalization increases customer retention is through tailored product recommendations. By sending emails that correctly match your buyers’ purchasing trends and predicting their needs, you can get them hooked. They’ll have no reason to look at competitors if you are already delivering unique messages and recommendations they find relevant.
3. Improves your customer experience
Hyper-personalization allows you to increase your engagement rates with your customers. By sending optimized messages, you can get your prospects to take actions like reviewing your products and sharing feedback and testimonials. This will make them feel seen and appreciated.
Apart from engaging with your customers, hyper-personalization can also help you build trust. One of the reasons for email marketing is to build credibility with customers and have them gravitate toward your brand. Depending on your customers’ needs, you can send them educational content like how-tos, thought pieces, case studies, and videos, all of which will help them learn more about your business and build trust.
4. Reduces your email marketing costs
Engaging customers by email and getting them to convert takes time and resources. As a business owner, you will have to pay for premium tools and A/B test your campaigns before you send out a blast. Hyper-personalization makes all this easier.
Since you already have the data for each specific customer, you can send customers emails they are interested in. You can increase your open rates and other metrics you are targeting with your campaigns. Research shows that marketers using advanced personalization typically see a 10-15% increase in revenue.
Hyper-personalization also allows you to send emails that will interest your audience. You will stop wasting customers’ time on products/services they don’t need. By reducing purchase anxiety, you can spend less to increase your conversion rates, and you won’t have to retarget a prospect ten times.
5. Helps you understand your audience better
Hyper-personalization uses data and analytics to help you predict customers’ needs and send them relevant emails. The more you get a customer to interact with your brand, the more data and insight you gain. This can create compounding effects that help you understand your audience better.
You can leverage that data to provide an even more advanced personalization to help you achieve all your marketing goals. Additionally, you can use data from different customers to tailor the experience for customers who try to get out of your sales funnel.
Hyper-personalization can also help you with customer acquisition and help you stay ahead of competitors. Currently, only a small number of marketers are early adopters of leveraging hyper-personalization in their marketing. If you collect enough data that helps you understand your existing customers, you can use that data to target competitors’ clients.
How to hyper-personalize your marketing emails
Your favorite email service provider will help you meet your basic personalization needs. They’ll let you personalize your subject lines and client’s first name and group them based on demographics and interests. But to perform hyper-personalization, that won’t be enough.
You will need more advanced ESPs and other applications to help you collect and analyze data, automate emails, and serve all your email subscribers individually. The tools should also be able to collect website and app analytics. Additionally, you should be able to store and secure the data you collect. A breach can significantly affect your reputation and push customers away.
Hyper-personalization requires a lot of data collection, and customers might not be ready to give it to you. Ensure that you avoid aggressive approaches in collecting data. Focus on building trust slowly, adhere to all government data collection laws, and follow industry standards.
You can create your own email campaign by using the PosterMyWall Email Marketing Platform. Check it out below:
