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Personalization and Interactivity: Why you should be using this perfect pairing

Every email marketer out there is looking for ways to get more opens, clicks, and conversions.

After all, even a modest lift in your most important email marketing metrics can translate to real returns on the bottom line.

So with all the tactics and techniques out there, two strategies have emerged.

One is using personalization in email. That just means trying to segment and focus emails on groups of people vs. sending one email to everyone on your list.

In a situation like this, a simple way to use it is to send all your Chicago based subscribers a Chicago-centric email. This type of content is a great way to get people interested and engaged with your emails because it speaks directly to them.

The other popular strategy is to use interactive content. This is content that gets your subscribers to actively engage with what they see.

Interactive content tends to get more clicks and conversions vs. static content. It gets readers excited about what they’ve got popping up in their inbox.

Where email marketers continue to focus

Litmus recently conducted a survey where they asked marketers about the top email design trends of 2019.

These were the five most popular responses:

Notice anything that relates to what we were talking about before?

Including personalization as dynamic content and interactive content in emails were the top two answers. The fourth most popular response also plays into this, and that’s having more live content in emails.

You can probably notice a pattern here.

Consumers want emails that appeal to them and their specific wants and needs are visually appealing and drive them take action, and are dynamic.

Now, here’s what you should be doing to start capitalizing on these trends.

Combine personalization and interactivity into one.

This paring can offer you a massive advantage over your competitors because in one email you’re giving your subscribers the best of both worlds and driving engagement.

Let’s take a look at it in action.

Revealing content

Take a look at this spa example.

This sort of email can be segmented to a specific subset of customers who are frequent buyers, especially in the summer months.

Now, lots of retailers can send out a SALE email, get some clicks, and call it a day. But by taking it just a step further and making this content more interactive, it intrigues the reader into participating.

They have to take an actual action beyond just clicking to reveal what the summer savings program is. The simple act of ‘scratching’ helps to trigger the reader’s brain to become more emotionally invested and take ownership of the results.

Using reveal marketing, you can tap into both personalization and interactivity to get people more interested in your products or services.

Interactivity in many forms

Another cool feature that brands are tapping into is using geo-location to personalize emails.

Check out the email below.

For a hotel, this is a clever use of both location and personalization.

Imagine it’s the dead of winter and one of your target customers, Karen, lives in Minneapolis. She’s surrounded by three feet of snow and gusting winds.

It’s more than likely she’s a bit fed up with her local weather. As an email marketer, you can use that. You can create an email that shows her what she could be enjoying in sunny California, where the weather is lovely this time of year, and entice her to book a trip.

Now, this email probably isn’t going to work if Karen lived in Miami or Phoenix, but because the personalization is targeted to a specific location, it’s speaking directly to the psychological and emotional needs of the target audience.

Weather and location are becoming increasingly popular methods of combining interactivity and personalization in emails.

Here’s another more practical use:

Transactional emails, like this shipping one, see some of the highest open rates out there. After all, who doesn’t want to know where their stuff is?

But with interactive and dynamic content in your transactional emails, you can start giving your customers much more specific and up to date information on what stage in the cycle their products are and when they will arrive.

That’s a much more transparent way of showing customers the shipping process, and it helps them have a much better sense of when things are going to arrive.

Even seemingly small details like this, if you choose to level them up, can make a really big positive impact on your customers.

Combining personalization and interactivity makes a difference

If you want to start standing out from the crowd and appealing to your customers in a way that targets the needs, wants, and even weather patterns proactively, this is the way to go.

Start learning how you can make your emails more personalized and interactive, so they better serve your customers and subscribers.

Liz Gravatar
Liz Froment

Liz Froment is a content writer at Zembula. A graduate of University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Liz is a travel aficionado, Boston sports fan, and maple syrup connoisseur.

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What Are Personalized Emails?

If you’re reading this, there’s probably a really good chance your inbox is overflowing with emails.

And, you probably only read a fraction of them.

Notes from friends or co-workers, shipping confirmations, a handful of newsletters you love, you read those.

The rest?

Good luck. Maybe if you have time, or if something happens to catch your eye.

Now, as an email marketer, that info, while common, might make you cringe a bit. How many people are doing that exact same thing with your emails?

Unless you have a 100% click to open rate, the answer is at a minimum a few hundred and more likely thousands.

That’s thousands of potential customers missing out on really good products or services because they just aren’t that engaged with your emails.

So how do you turn that around?

There are a few ways, but a big one we’re going to cover here is personalization.

Creating personalized emails is a great way to start standing out from the competition in the vast sea of boring emails littering your customer’s inbox.

We’re going to explore personalized emails more here.

Personalized emails: what they are and why you need them

There’s an old saying that you probably heard from your grandparents, but still holds today: everyone’s favorite topic is themselves.

Psychology Today tells us why:

Well, according to one study, talking about oneself activates the same areas of the brain that light up when eating good food, taking drugs and even having sex. Simply put, self-disclosure is gratifying. It gives us a neurological buzz.

That same buzz applies to emails.

When you personalize the emails, you send your readers all you’re doing is finding ways to provide the information that matters to them. These emails also lead to higher levels of engagement — something that matters to most marketers.

That’s why you always read a shipping confirmation email, right? It’s because you want to know where your package is in the supply chain. That information matters to you.

A lot of brands are embracing the concept of personalization in emails, especially in ways that move beyond the standard stuff you see. Now, you can send emails that highlight specific geographic locations, even down to a neighborhood, weather, likes, activity, and more.

All of those small ways of adding more personalization can make a massive difference when it comes to improving your metrics. Personalized emails see higher open and click-through rates too.

Are you convinced yet?

How about a few examples of really good personalized emails in action?

Learn from these personalized emails

Grammarly is a great example of a company that sends out highly personalized emails.

Each week, premium users get an email that highlights their writing streak along with any new badges. Plus productivity, mastery, and vocabulary as compared to other users and some personalized tips on fixing errors.

If you don’t think people love opening up emails highlighting their grammar errors, think again.

What’s the first thing you think about once you get home from vacation?

For most people, it’s trying to figure out when they can go back on vacation again! British Airways knows how people thing and do a really good job on both ends of a trip sending out personalized emails.

Before the trip starts, they send out one that offers information about what you need to prepare for your trip. But this one, which comes a few days after you’ve landed is super simple but very clever.

Peloton is another brand that is able to send really personalized emails to their users. These emails pull in all sorts of information, including geolocation and past behavior to make them hyper-targeted to your specific needs.

These are the classes you are either already into or classes that Peloton thinks they can get you to sign up for based on your past visits.

By showing the instructor as well as the dates and times of your local studio, it makes it very easy to sign up for more.

GasBuddy is an app that tracks the gas prices in your area. It also has a feature that lets it track your driving habits.

If you choose to use it, GasBuddy will send you a monthly personalized update that shows you all sorts of information about your diving habits compared to others in your geographic area.

It’s similar to Grammarly in that it also offers you a few tips on how to improve based on your behavior.

As you can see just from a few of these examples, there are all sorts of cool things you can do to your emails to give your readers a much more personalized experience. So what are you waiting for?

If you want to know more about how Zembula does live, personalized images in email, just click here!

Liz Gravatar
Liz Froment

Liz Froment is a content writer at Zembula. A graduate of University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Liz is a travel aficionado, Boston sports fan, and maple syrup connoisseur.

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