Using email personalisation to be intuitive, not invasive.

When you think about personalising an email, what springs to mind? Maybe using a merge code to insert a customer’s name into a subject line. ‘Emily, have you seen our new discount?’, or starting an email with ‘Hi James!’ This isn’t the only way to personalise your emails and it often isn’t the best way.

Targeting your customers this way can lead to great results – increased open rates, higher levels of engagement and improvements on ROI, to name a few. However, personalisation only works if you use it in a way that is clever and not creepy.

Think about going into your favourite coffee shop. Let’s say you go in every day and order exactly the same drink, each time giving the barista your name. The next day you come in, and the barista smiles at you and says ‘Hi [your name] will it be a skinny decaf latte with caramel syrup?’ That’s great customer service. Now imagine you walk into a coffee shop you’ve never been into and a barista you’ve never spoken to before says the same thing… creepy.

It’s the same with email. If you’re emailing a customer for the first time and using their name in the communication, it can come across like you’re stalking them. As you can imagine, this isn’t great for customer relationships.

Here are a few pointers to keep in mind when you’re trying to personalise.

 

Have you contacted this person before?

If you have contacted a customer previously and asked for information about them, then using their details in an email should come as no surprise to them. Personalisation is all about building up a rapport with your customers. The more communication you’ve had with them, the more personalised content you can use.

If you’ve never contacted them before, why not ease them into the relationship using a ‘we’d like to get to know you better’ email. This will allow you to gain more insight into your customer, while at the same time making them feel at home with your communications.
Is your language mirroring the personalisation?

Personalisation is not just about writing customer’s names in an email or subject line. It’s also about how that personalisation is continued throughout the campaign. Using phrases like ‘you’ and ‘your’ can help continue the personalisation and show the customer how your product or message applies to them.

 

Is your data being used correctly?

You’d be shocked how many examples of badly used personalisation come into inboxes every day. What this demonstrates is that companies are sending emails without understanding their data, even at a basic level. You’ll be able to spot this by looking for the wrong information coming through in a merge code. One company recently pulled their customers last names through in the email rather than their first names.

The really awkward part of this was that the rest of the email was written in a very light hearted, familiar fashion. It was like reading an email about grabbing a drink after work… from your high school headmaster. ‘Hi Chaplin, have you seen these offers you’re going to love?’

Definitely creepy.

The other mistake companies often make with data is attention to detail. Check that the personalisation you’re using is going to work across the whole database. Sure, it’s great that Jamie, Akhil and Vanessa will get lovely personalised messages but what about Woody, whose first name you haven’t collected? Woody gets a ‘Hi __’.  Woody doesn’t deserve to be blanked. Worse, he might even get a ‘Hi First_Name’. He’ll notice your email for all the wrong reasons and either quickly unsubscribe or maybe even share it with his friends or online to point out your error. Help Woody out and protect your brand by checking your data. Double check it. Check it again.

 

Is the personalisation appropriate?

Are you getting in touch using a communication that is person specific? For example, birthday emails. There’s nothing less personal than getting a ‘Happy birthday Sir/Miss’ email. This is a perfect time to use that data you’ve been saving for a special occasion. Birthday emails are a fantastic excuse to show your customer how much you value them. It’s your chance to give them some added value – perhaps with a free offer or a discount code. For Retail companies, a chance to use the “Spoil yourself with a new…” sales approach.

The best example of these emails that I’ve seen is from Pizza Express who sent an email with the subject line ‘Happy Birthday *Name*’ Inside the email was an offer for a free bottle of prosecco with any main meal. They even included a lovely gif of the champagne being poured into the glass – and the little candle also flickered.

Another great time to use this is Christmas: ‘Kate, what do you want for Christmas’? It’s a fantastic time of year to make the jump from ‘brand that occasionally emails you’ to ‘brand who knows you’. Incidentally, it’s also a great time to get more intelligent with your data and find out more about the people you’re emailing. Why not use the sparkly magic of big annual events like Christmas, New year, January sales and Easter to squeeze out some more information and make your data richer for the next email campaign? Apply segmentation to entice them with something that’s relevant to your customer and their purchasing history.

 

Are you missing an opportunity?

Are you holding data about a customer’s purchase history? If you are, this is a great cross sell opportunity. If they’ve already bought something from you, they’ve already interacted with the brand – which gives you a way in. You can approach the cross sell in a friendly manner: ‘Hi Anni, we thought you might like these…” Provide some useful information, such as “these shoes go with this dress…” or “popular picks in knitwear…” and so on. People have busy lives – help them; provide tips they can use to make their lives better/easier/more productive. If you can be of use to your customers they’ll come to rely on you, which builds brand loyalty and keeps them coming back.

Once again, there’s a difference between being clever and creepy in these situations. While it’s okay to refer to an item you think your customer might like, it’s not okay to get too specific. Imagine opening an email to find ‘Hi Anni, we noticed you bought three red medium sized Christmas jumpers last Saturday at 3:30pm on your Android phone, and we thought you’d also like these things’. Creepy!

The best way to win in this situation is to be insightful but casual. ‘We thought you’d like this’ is always the safer option.

 

What do they want?

This is without a doubt the most important thing to remember. Sure, you’re emailing your customers for your benefit; maybe to sell to them, maybe to keep them engaged with your brand – whatever the reason, the number one point to remember is ‘what do they want?’
Preferences are the key. This can range from a simple gender split, to segmenting your data based on what types of communications your users are interested in. The best newsletters that arrive in your inbox are the ones which have content tailored to you. This not only makes the customer feel special but will also mean they’re more likely to interact with that communication.

One brand that does this particularly well is RSA Canada. Their monthly newsletter is segmented by what region their brokers are in, as well as by preference type – and they even have a translated version for their French speakers. This means that each month, each of their brokers receive a newsletter that is completely tailored to them. It’s no wonder that their last newsletter boasted a 28% click thru rate.

When you’re putting together your next email campaign, check your data, check the communication history, run through your personalisation checklist and make sure that you’re being clever and not creepy. If in doubt, apply the party rule. You would never walk up to someone at a party whose name you couldn’t remember and say ‘Hi…First Name’. No, you’d be subtle – you’d go and ask a friend or maybe work your way to that piece of information through another means.

The same applies to your data. If you don’t know their gender, don’t just assume they are a male just because most of your database is. A female colleague of mine recently received a beautiful email from a fashion brand – unfortunately they had sent her the menswear collection of jumpers.

One final tip is to always ask yourself the question; ‘if I applied this in a party or networking situation, would people be running in the opposite direction?’ If the answer is yes then re-think your strategy. Not creepy? Email to your heart’s content.

Targeting a database on a seasonal basis can be a brilliant way to engage with an audience. Quirks and eye-catchers can encourage users to interact with emails and even re-engage with a brand or product that may have been lost in the sea that is anyone’s inbox.

With the winter season in full swing, Enabler email executive Sophie has put together her Halloween pick of the ‘missed a tricks’ and the spooky treats…

Spooky Treats

New Look

New Look is a brand that always hit the mark with their emails, and their Halloween special is no exception. They’ve done a few things which will really make a difference to their customers:

  • Straight away, they try to lure their customers into buying a spooky outfit with a discount code that’s perfect for the occasion. This works especially well for them as Halloween is notorious for being one of the fancy dress events of the year and they’ve successfully capitalised on this – great strategy.

  • The flicker in the background is a .gif image, giving the impression of lightning. Not only is it on theme with the email but it’s a fantastic attention grabber.

  • The email clearly has gender targeting as well as merge codes that pull in the user’s name.

  • Consistent messaging throughout the email reinforces the call to action and really makes you want to buy something.

  • I didn’t open the email first time round due to being away from the computer, and got another one a few days later. This means New Look are doing resends to everyone on their list who didn’t open the initial email. They’ve even updated the subject line to try and grab attention in a different way.

 

 

Sainsbury’s

Sainsbury’s was definitely top of the supermarket Halloween emailers this year. The theme of the email was well executed: ‘we can make your Halloween great’. They didn’t just rely on one pun for the email, they themed everything about the email around Halloween while still maintaining a strong brand message. Here are a few things that made this email so good:

Personalisation
​They got the user’s name in there without being creepy – this made the email personable and immediately got the user thinking about their Halloween plans.

Relevancy
Immediately after the short and sweet introduction, they threw in some alcohol and party food pictures to continue the ‘have a great night’ theme.

Attractive design
Eye catching, drop-down banner animation in the hero image promoted special offers – all Halloween and party themed, of course.

Responsive

The responsive design looks great on mobile. It’s clean, crisp, and they haven’t sacrificed the desktop design for it.

‘Missed a trick’

In our ‘missed a trick’ section, we have some classic examples of puns-gone-wrong. Quite a few brands took the popular ‘spooktacular’ pun and tried to shoehorn their offer into it. A well-known hotel booking site was one such example, promoting their “shockingly terrific” hotels and inviting the recipient to “view hotels if you dare.” This is a mismatch with their offering; unless you are selling nights in a haunted house, why would anyone choose to stay in a creepy hotel?

The main problem with these puns is that they are not relevant to the product. If you’re not emailing relevant content, you just should not be emailing. The subject line for the email had some cute emoticons in it but unfortunately as a Gmail user, these came up as tiny square blobs in my inbox. What they could have done here was split their send between Gmail and non-Gmail users, keeping the emoticons where users would be able to view them and removing for Gmail to avoid the embarrassing ‘no image display’ block for Gmail users.

A popular homeware brand were another case of a company who appear to have thought ‘Halloween is coming up… we have to do something’. They also pulled out the Halloween book of puns and came up with exactly the same idea as many other companies. Unlike some of the others in this article, however, they did not continue the theme throughout the email. Here are a few things they could have considered when planning this email campaign:

  • Embrace the theme and build it into every level of the content. If you’re going to get in the Halloween spirit, keep it consistent throughout the email.

  • More personalisation – they used the customer number at the top, which is a start, but having their name at the top next to it could work even better. The customer name was shown at the bottom of the email but with such a long email, it would take a really dedicated subscriber to scroll down that far without losing interest.

A national supermarket chain also used the same ‘spooktacular’ pun as the two previous companies. Unlike the homeware brand, they continued the theme throughout the email.  The overall email design wasn’t bad at all – responsive and worked well on mobile. The main issue (apart from the terrible pun) is that none of the links worked. Sadly, this was true throughout the email. Every link clicked through to an error page on their website.

Clearly, this is a problem. The main reason for this email campaign was to drive customers to the Aldi site to make purchases. If something in the email sparks a customer’s attention and they click through to an error page, they are unlikely to remain on the site or buy anything. The customer experience will have been frustrating and the error will reflect on the brand. Avoid this by thoroughly testing all your links and ensuring they are relevant.

Halloween is over for the year but Christmas is fast approaching. Don’t miss out on engaging with your audience and make sure you’re ready with any email communications in time for the busiest shopping time of the year.

If you’re going to theme your emails, think hard about how to make them relevant to both the theme AND the customer. Keep in mind the ‘missed a tricks’ and, more importantly, the treats from our selection above. Get creating and we’ll see you back here for our Christmas email special. And as always, if you want to talk to us about Enabler or our email campaign services give us a call on 020 7099 6370 or email enablermail@pancentric.com