The Importance Of Email Personalisation

December 19, 2022

Ecommerce Masterclass

The importance of email personalisation

The importance of email personalisation is probably the first thing to stress to a new ecommerce retailer, that they should never fail to include, in their primary efforts. The professional marketers among you will be nodding your heads now, knowing full well the volume of sales it delivers.

What use is a pretty website if you don’t drive traffic to it? But think how many emails you personally receive every day. Unless you have a lot of free time, and probably a deep-rooted psychological problem, not all of those emails are going to be read.

Just like you, your customers will have to pick and choose from the emails they receive, the most important and meaningful to them. So, how can you ensure that you are creating emails that are meaningful to your customers? The brightest star in this firmament, delivering the greatest ROI, is personalisation.

The benefits of personalisation

Personalisation could be the key to consistently achieving high open and click through rates. But lets just pause a moment here, and appreciate that every article written over the last ten years will, at this point, tell you that personalisation is including your customer name at the top of the email. Oh blimey!

Technically they’re right. But tech has moved on so far now, it means predictive personalisation software (PPL), where data captured on your site tells you so much more about your customer to take advantage of, including exactly what products each customer is most likely to buy next.

You may wonder if this is useful, so let us explain what the big four research companies in the world found, McKinsey, Bain, Statista and Forrester – that PPL increases ROI 20x more than standard promotional email-marketing, omnichannel-marketing and social media-marketing combined. That’s twenty times as much – which is huge!

This is the difference between a successful ecommerce retailers and those that will perpetually struggle.

It show just how important personalisation can be for email marketing. Yet, many retailers still fail to launch, and they will be the ones you pass on your way up.

Why is email personalisation so important?

Predictive personalisation software is more than just automatic, with zero human involvement whatsoever it is autonomous. That means it delivers dynamic content that is unique to each individual consumer, that including a person at any stage would denigrate the data. Great for you, it does it for you. Meaning the ROI has just blown away where you need staff to do it, that overhead is gone.

It has perpetually updating content, from the moment of the consumer visits your site to the moment an email is opened. Various factors are applicable, including, previous purchase history, products that have been viewed, the number of times those views happened, when they happened, how those views reflect on previous purchases, patterns or sequences that established previous purchase based on those views etc. these and many others can be secured using the KPI’s available to you.

The most important KPIs being:

Conversion Rate
Conversion Rate Per Traffic Channel
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV/CLTV)
Customer Retention Rate
Annual Repurchase Rate
Average Order Value (AOV)
Net Profit
Cart Abandonment Rate
Add to Cart Rate
Orders Per Active Customers
Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV)
Return on Investment (ROI)
Influencer ROI
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Return on Marketing Investment
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Average Profit Per Customer
Revenue Per Site Visitor
Time on Site
Bounce Rate
Organic Search Rankings
Customer Satisfaction

It’s pretty obvious that PPS would be an enhancement to be able to capture more data than just on offer from Google Analytics. Then having done so, be able for that system to automatically rank each and every SKU you have into the greatest “likelihood to purchase” ranking for each and every consumer you have. And then deliver the top ones of those selected, by email, timely to that individual consumer.

The benefit of email personalisation is that when it arrives on the doormat of the recipient (figuratively), it is already well received. After all, these are consumer’s whose loyalty to you is already established – i.e. they have agreed to subscribe to your mailing list, and are established customers. The goodwill is already there.

But loyalty however, is not guaranteed, as it is human nature to be fickle, and heaven help you if your retailing prowess finds you underselling, or slow on delivery etc, as detailed in our feature loyalty fears grow as they start to fall.

So what does predictive personalisation email marketing deliver that ESPs can’t. The primary headline will undoubtably be the exclusion of human beings and their frailties, such as undermining data-accuracy in the process, together their cost, an inherent overhead to do so.

You always need to consider the cost of staff when calculating your ROI for marketing, see article “How much do your staff really cost“.

What’s the bottom line

It is a given that post PPS installation, each email sent is now deadly accurate. Product offerings are always on-point, being strictly what the consumer wants to buy – exclusively known by their actions, both visiting, navigation around your site and purchases made.

Picture them receiving an email and thinking “Blimey, I was only looking at that yesterday”. You might think big-brother, but more often the reality is is that it is self-answered. Ask why were they looking at the product – yesterday? Obviously because they were interested in it. You are just building on their own personal decisions.

SwiftERM is a Microsoft Certified Partner. We offer PPS software – on a free trial for a month.