In our XaaS (anything as a service) driven world, anything and everything is marketable content. What this means for your business is that you need to think about the best ways to target your customers, both potential and existing.
This can be achieved in many ways. Maybe it’s by using search engine optimization services to
get your company to rank effectively or utilize your existing retail data analytics. Or maybe, as this article will show you that it can be achieved by personalizing send-outs. This makes them feel special and important and can encourage them to either make a purchase from you or even become a repeat customer.
What Are Bulk Emails?
Bulk emails are emails companies use to send out information to a large segment. You’ve probably received a few yourself. You know, the “here’s our latest offer!” kind of emails.
Personalizing these emails can make all the difference when it comes to keeping your customers engaged. This article will lay out five top tips for personalizing bulk emails.
1. Create Dynamic Content
This is the practice of making the content in your email personalized, depending on the customer, or perhaps even the time of year. Essentially, it means to tailor the content to the receiver. This is the first building block in personalizing bulk emails as it dictates all other decisions you’ll have to make about your campaign. Which parts of your email are you going to personalize? Which sections will be original or standard?
Will this change over time? The go-to personalization options most often involve inserting a name snippet, usable in both the subject line and body of the email.
You only need to write one email but personalize sections of it to fit different customer segments. This way, your customers will each feel valued, without you having to manually fill out every single email.
2. Segment Your Audience
Dynamic content is achieved by effective segmentation of your customer base. What this essentially means, at least in terms of bulk emails, is that you need to effectively and appropriately identify different categories of your customer base, and tailor your content to their specification.
For example, are you segmenting your demographic by gender? Age? Likes and dislikes? Location? Job title?
It all depends on what your product is and what you’re trying to sell to people. If you’re selling a music streaming platform, segment your customer base by the most listened-to artist. If you’re selling an ecommerce shopping platform, segment customers by purchase history. If you’re selling holiday packages, segment customers by age or geographic location.
Largely focussed on common sense, even the most switched-on business owners skip this step. Before you can personalize content, you need to decide who you’re targeting.
You can use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to gather all the intel you’ll need, or you can do it the old-fashioned, human way. As long as you base it on what your product or service is trying to achieve, you’re way ahead of the competition.
3. Personalize Product Recommendations
Here’s where things get specific. Now that you’ve identified your customer segments and which sections of your email will be dynamic, you can decide which products you’re going to recommend to specific demographics.
Going back to the holiday package example, if you’ve determined that a large segment of your customer base lives in the US, you’d primarily advertise holidays to the LATAM market, as this is a popular (and affordable) destination for US travelers.
While many services offer VoIP systems for small business, or perhaps business communication tools or software. You might want to segment your customer base based on employee numbers or by gross profit. For larger customer bases, you’d advertise a more heavy-duty software that can handle a lot of traffic, you could advertise a simple phone number forwarding system. If you want better, high-quality, and more accurate results you may want to consider investing in a product recommendation software.
4. Promote Special Offers
This is another method of personalizing content and a great way to facilitate an increase in sales during slow months.
Have you got a product on offer at the moment? Do you have some sort of loyalty reward for customers who make repeat ecommerce orders? Maybe for customers who’ve been subscribed to you for a certain period? What about time-dependent offers? Do you have a summer sale? A holiday collection?
Incorporating special offers in your bulk emails can be a great way to re-engage old customers. By keeping your content fresh and up-to-date, your buyers are more likely to stay with your business.
This is especially useful for larger businesses or companies that have been established for a long time. People could have signed up years ago and subsequently forgotten how much of a great service you provide, so sending them updates with the latest products and special offers can reignite their obsession with your brand.
Bear This in Mind
Remember, it’s all about making your customers feel happy and valued because they are. They’re what make your business successful, so it’s worth putting in the time and effort to focus in on every detail. You’ll no doubt see results. And soon.
Good luck!
