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Email marketing certainly can have a bit of a spammy reputation. Marketers would blast out emails en masse to long lists of subscribers, hoping something would stick. This “spray and pray” approach led to fatigue and eroded trust between brands and their audiences. If you are still spraying and praying, it’s time to try sending personalized emails.
The shift towards more targeted, personalized, and genuine email marketing should be easier nowadays. New technology makes personalized email possible. Some companies also put an emphasis on relationship-building, and consumers expect it.
In this article, I look at:
- The issues with traditional spray-and-pray emailing
- What is a personalized email strategy
- What consumers and regulators expect from email marketers today
- How advanced segmentation and personalization tools enable better targeting
- Why taking an “audience-first” approach is key to ethical emailing
- How genuine relationship-building boosts results
Problems With the Old Spray-and-Pray Approach
The spray and pray approach basically has meant:
- I have your email
- So, I will send you what I want to get out there
- Fingers crossed that you find it interesting
This spray-and-pray approach treats the audience like faceless email addresses rather than real people. But consumers have come to expect more from their inbox experience. Irrelevant and overly promotional emails are quickly unsubscribed from or sent to spam. Plus, personalized emails have been proven to work.
What Is Email Personalization?
Email personalization refers to customizing messaging for each subscriber based on known information about them. This entails matching copy, offers, advice, and more to individual preferences, behaviors, and attributes.
Personalized email recognizes every subscriber as a segment of one – unique in their wants, challenges, and lifecycle stage. It represents the ultimate target marketing tailored to the individual.
Capabilities like dynamic content and integrated data sources make personalization possible. Advanced platforms automate the process so marketers can focus on strategy over complex manual execution.
Listen in: Balancing Business Goals and Subscriber Respect: An Ethical Email Marketing Discussion
Forms of Email Personalization
Many options exist for tailoring email around the individual subscriber. Common personalization tactics include:
- Personalized subject lines using merge fields with the subscriber’s name, company, role, etc.
- Recommended content based on past email engagement
- Dynamic calls-to-action aligned to previously viewed pages
- Individualized product/service recommendations driven by AI algorithms
- Customized advice for user lifecycle stage based on historical interactions
- Personalized scheduling aligned to an individual’s typical engagement times
- Conditional content showing different messages per user based on attributes and behaviors
The ability to tailor messaging for relevancy across copy, imagery, and offers demonstrates respect for subscribers’ time. This drives higher open and click rates as well as stronger customer relationships.
Read next: 9 tips for better email marketing writing
What Consumers Expect From Brands Today
Consumer expectations have risen across every marketing channel, email included. People want relevant communication on their terms when and where they choose to engage.
Irrelevant emails feel like spam, no matter the sender or past relationship. Consumers assume brands have the capability to tailor messaging based on previous engagement and declared preferences.
Tools like preference centers, preference profiles, and subscription management put control squarely in the hands of subscribers. They expect email senders to enable and respect their choices.
“Without understanding where they’re at and what their feedback is, how can we really email them?” email copywriter Yuval Ackerman said on “The Business Storytelling Show.”
Sophisticated Segmentation in the Modern Email Stack
Thankfully, email marketing technology has evolved to meet rising consumer expectations through sophisticated audience segmentation.
Dynamic email content based on known customer data allows brands to tailor messaging without losing personalization. Tracking consumer behaviors and preferences enables marketers to group contacts for aligned email journeys.
Ensuring relevancy requires planning, though. Email touchpoints and communications need to be thought through, which is a different skill from writing and sending an email.
Tools like HubSpot, ConvertKit, and others incorporate segmenting directly in their email platforms. Based on profiles, past engagement, purchased products, and more, unique subscriber experiences can be defined without manual list creation.
CRM data can feed directly into email journeys as well. When brands track cross-channel engagement in their databases, email contacts update automatically. This prevents disjointed, irrelevant messaging customers hate.
Other segmentation methods apply broad demographic, firmographic, and behavioral filters to group contacts. Personas, lead scores, and lifecycle stage data inform the segments for aligned messaging. Static groups based on high-level attributes remain relevant longer than one-off spray and pray blasts.
Ultimately, segmentation lets brands customize the frequency of sending messages and the message content. Through its inherent personalization, it draws in audiences and boosts engagement metrics.
Putting the Audience at the Center of Email Marketing
Technology alone cannot make email marketing ethical or effective. Brands must couple segmentation capabilities with an audience-centeric mindset shift.
This means constructing email marketing strategies around subscriber wants and needs first, not sender goals. Respecting consumer relationships must sit at the core.
Yuval embodies this mindset through her specialized “ethical email marketing services.” She explains, “When you do things ethically…the results are twice and three times industry benchmarks.”
An audience-first approach looks at open and click rates not as isolated metrics but as signals of relevancy and value provided to subscribers. By optimizing sends around the experience itself, performance lifts naturally.
It also means granting subscribers control via open communication channels. Consistently asking for direct input and feedback demonstrates respect for their time and attention,
When brands engage ethically, Yuval finds subscribers more willing to reciprocate through deeper commitment. They feel valued as people, not just conduits for sales.
Relationship-Building: The New Key to Email Success
To succeed long-term, there needs to be a focus on genuine relationships over message volume and frequency. As spray-and-pray methods decline, relationship-building emerges as the new differentiator.
Yuval notes that when brands cultivate true conversations with subscribers, performance metrics multiply despite lower send volumes. The quality of relationships substitutes the need for excessive quantity in communications.
Relationships flourish through value-focused content solving subscriber problems over promoting sender offerings.
So, with the right tools, mindset, and strategy, personalized emails are possible for a business, and when done well, they can drive even better results and annoy fewer people.
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