Personalised email marketing made simple. Consumers have come to demand and expect relevant and personalised content and experience, both online and offline. To meet those demands, marketers are striving to leverage email personalisation to move toward 1:1 experiences that not only meet, but exceed consumer expectations.

That’s why it’s not surprising that, when asked to prioritise one capability that will be most important to marketing in the future, 74% of marketers say targeted personalisation increases customer engagement, and they see a huge increase in sales when using personalised experiences.

What is email personalisation?

Personalisation, in the context of email marketing, is the act of targeting an email campaign to a specific subscriber by leveraging the data and information you have about them. It used to be perceived as information like their first name, the last product they bought, where they live, how many times they log into your app, or a number of other data points. Luckily that ship has sailed.

You can no longer point at it being this, especially just the fundamental elements, and say this is personalisation. No, now it means using each and every bit of personal data you have, on each and every individual consumer. Miss something, and sales will be lost as a direct and immediate consequence. This is hyper-critical marketing, by the highest standards.

Personalising your email campaigns is a proven way to increase your open and click-through rates and can have a measurable impact on your ROI and revenue. Consider the following statement:

Studies have shown emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened than those without, and one ESP found that revenue is 5.7 times higher in emails that employ personalisation.

This is taken from a leading ESP website live and active today. What is doesn’t tell you is that it refers to elements as basic as using the name of the consumer in your email. Yet the distinction between this and big-data applications like SwiftERM, the personalisation SaaS, is enormous. The biggest and best research houses Statista and McKinsey have been doing annual studies on personalisation for the past 5 years, and actually verify that 20 times more sales are available by getting personalisation right.

These results stem from the fact that personalised emails are more relevant to subscribers. Instead of receiving a campaign with generic offers and messaging, your subscribers will receive an email that is targeted directly at them, includes their name, and provides offers (products, promotions, etc.) that are relevant to their interests. 

The obvious elements that can be personalised include to whom it is addressed and subject line. But, and this is where we lose all but the very best solutions, you my be surprised to know that your captured data can also  be used for individual product selections for each consumer as an individual.

The biggest return is through automation

If you leave product selection to segmentation software, you make it a lot easier to design and prepared your email, sadly you also lose a massive chunk of revenue. To look at this you need to consider what a segment is. It is ideal for you to target people who according to your segment definitions are most likely to buy a particular product. but what its they bought it that morning, or already have it in an alternate colour, fabric, idiom short-sleeve as opposed to long-sleeved etc, a wasted email.

What then if you could employ a permanently running solution which, nano-seconds before sending, selects the exact products with the highest likelihood of being bought by that individual consumer. There will be precious retailers reading this, who will be thinking “but what if my customers don’t like that?”. While we respect it is a consideration, the answer, available across a myriad of sites, will illustrate that the opposite is the case. Consumer’s love you tailoring their selection for them, it is far more important to them than maintaining a house style, or design layout, aesthetics etc. The fact it generates so much more revenue answers any doubts, indeed smashes it into oblivion.

With such diversity of taste, it would be impossible to address such personalisation by traditional marketing means. SwiftERM, a Microsoft Partner company, have devised a means for extreme personalisation of all your marketing communications, addressing each and every consumer as an individual. It is from a stable of big-data solutions called predictive personalisation, which has been much hailed over the last few years as it delivers such a huge multiple in it’s returns that it literally dwarfs traditional marketing and omnichannel methods combined.

This ability to deliver is hugely due to zero segmentation of any communication with your customer whatsoever. In practise this means no one is treated as a segment, and made to feel as this they have been lumped into being in a convenient group – segment. Don’t alienated them, i.e. part of a group – all women over 50, or anyone who has made a purchase of Channel this month, or simply been active in the last 18 months etc. All irrelevant to both their taste, but more importantly if insignificance to you as a customer..

If you appreciate how unique and personal product selection is, that uniqueness to each person distinctly, you are perfectly placed to appreciate that what is offered to each individual consumer must be unique and essential to them alone. Products selected to be offered by SwiftERM use a predictive analytics algorithm which watches both that individual’s buying habits but essentially what they browse, how often they return them, what they return, what they spend most time reviewing etc.

All of which creates a unique profile and contributes to their selections. To ignore this is to offer your competitors an opportunity to steal-away your customers, but equally important it fails to illustrate your empathy and lack of effort, to be worthy of being their preferred retailer.