Creating customer profiles and focusing on email personalization has been shown to increase lead-to-customer conversion rates and customer engagement. Experian’s 2013 email market study reported that personalized emails generate up to six times the revenue of non-personalized emails. Plus, 74% of marketers say that targeted personalization increases customer engagement, according to a recent Econsultancy report. All the same, many marketers are concerned about going overboard and appearing creepy. Are their concerns reasonable?
James Green from Magnetic put it best in an interview with HubSpot:
“Today the difference between ‘creepy’ and ‘not creepy’ is if an ad is so personalized it can only be for you. For example, an ad telling you to ‘buy diapers now because you’re giving birth in two weeks’ is too much, but an ad for diapers isn’t. Drawing the line between each is an art, not a science, and marketers must be always be considerate of their audience.”
If you’re creeped out at the idea of profiling and personalizing, you might need to change your mindset from thinking of these strategies as invasive to realizing that they’re about providing a better level of service for your customers. It’s not about tricking them into something but providing what they want when they want it. Customer profiles and personalized emails can be key parts of a successful email campaign—as long as you do it right. Here are a few ways to keep them from crossing the line into big-brother territory.
Know your audience.
What level of personalization is your target audience comfortable with? Once you know that, you can keep it at a level where they won’t lose trust in your brand. Use personalization where they expect it—in emails, for example, when they’ve opted in, given their name and possibly shared some areas of interest.
Add value.
Creating customer profiles are an effective way to add value to your audience. Click behavior and in-email surveys can provide a lot of info about your customers. Use that info to provide content that your customers want. Plus, don’t forget about using multichannel information—such as from social media—to craft more relevant content and create effective strategies for engaging your audience. This kind of data goes a long way toward providing the kind of content that gets more clicks and conversions.
Be accurate.
Sometimes the data gets it wrong. One sure way to alienate your subscribers is to misspell their name or to address them by the wrong name altogether. Be sure to watch out for the following:
- Name misspellings
- Gender pronouns
- Titles (Mrs. vs. Ms.)
- Fake names
Have you received a personalized email that was just too personalized? Share it below along with smart ways you’ve discovered to create accurate customer profiles and keep personalized emails doing what they’re supposed to do.
Get in touch with Filament to find out more about how to create an email marketing strategy that includes personalization without the creep factor.
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