Personalization - What It Is, How It Can Work for You

Personalization can really add a nice touch to your email marketing campaigns, especially if you have good data on your recipients. So what is personalization?  Defined, it's when you tailor your messages to your customer's characteristics. For example the simple form of personalization would be using your recipient's name in your content.

"Dear John

Welcome to the 3rd edition of our newsletter."

A more advanced scenario would be:

"Dear John

Thanks for buying Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince at our bookstore last week. We also thought you might be interested in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. We're offering a 10% discount if you purchase before November 1."

Something like this would work if you wanted to get rid of product inventory. In this case it's the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix book. Let's say you wanted to sell this book to anyone who purchased any Harry Potter books from you.

Well you're not going to type these out one by one right? Especially if you have hundreds or thousands of people on your list. Most Email Service Providers provide you with a way to do it all at once so here's how to do it using VerticalResponse.

1. Upload your list - When you upload your list into your account you'll include all of the first names of your recipients. You'll also include a custom field for your recipients. This custom field will be filled in with the name of the book they already purchased from you. See the example to the right.

When you upload your list you'll name that column "PotterBooks", see below.

2. Type your copy. It should look something like this if you are using VerticalResponse:

"Dear {FIRST_NAME}

Thanks for buying {PotterBooks} at our bookstore last week, we also thought you might be interested in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. We're offering a 10% discount if you purchase before November 1."

Now your fields will automatically be filled in for you depending on what their first name is and what book it was that they purchased.

This especially works if you really know what products a customer is likely to purchase from you next and you may even increase your response rate just buy knowing something about your recipients.

Are you using personalization? How is it working for you?

Comments

[glendale carpet cleaning]

I've been looking for material to help me understand the best way to market my blog and website. There is not that much practical knowledge available. Thanks!

[andrea]

How do you personailize data in an art image not in text?

[debt reduction]

You are so correct. Thank you very much for taking the time to post this. I am going to give it a try and see what happens. It took you to post this for me to "get it." Thank you.