The Ultimate Guide to Email Personalization

Today’s consumers no longer want to be numbers. They want every brand they interact with to treat them like an individual. And if you can’t deliver that level of personalization, they’ll find a brand that will. 

That’s the challenge marketers face today. We know what consumers want. But historically, it hasn’t been easy to deliver personalization at scale without a lot of time, energy, and effort. 

That’s where Zembula comes in. We provide you with the tools to make personalization at scale easy. Now, you can send individualized emails to every person on your list, giving them personalized 1:1 interactions with your brand. Doing so makes a huge difference to your engagement, conversions, and revenue. 

Here’s how to approach email personalization the Zembula way — using customer data to drive your bottom line.

What is email personalization?

Personalizing email is creating content tailored to each recipient’s specific preferences, behaviors, and needs. It’s way more effective than sending generic messages that apply to everyone. 

By personalizing email content, engagement rates like open and click-through rates can significantly improve since readers find the content more relevant and compelling and are more willing to click. And you can get even more out of your emails by adding personalized animation. When your emails move, they’re far more interesting to your readers, compelling them to click.  

There are many different approaches to personalizing email, including:

• Name personalization: This is the most basic form of personalization. Instead of a generic “Hey Customer,” you might use “Hey [First Name].” With better name personalization, you can drive even more engagement.
• Behavioral triggers: Send emails based on specific actions taken by the reader. For instance, if a customer has abandoned their shopping cart, send an email reminding them of the products they left behind.
• Dynamic content: Add content into the email that changes based on different customer data — for instance, showcasing products or offers based on the reader’s browse or purchase history.
• Product recommendations: Use your emails to recommend products based on your customer’s past behavior. Think of how Amazon sends personalized product recommendations in their emails based on your browsing and purchase history.
• Geolocation: Personalize emails based on the reader’s location. For example, sending promotions or news related to local in-store events.
• Birthday or anniversary emails: Send special messages on their birthday or other significant dates. These emails can be combined with coupons, discounts, or other special offers.
• Loyalty emails: Loyalty members are some of your most active shoppers and subscribers. Send them personalized loyalty emails to encourage more purchases and a higher long-term customer value.

The stats behind personalizing emails

Email marketing is the most critical channel for communicating with consumers today. Sure, social media has its bright spots, but you don’t own your audience like you do with email, and you certainly can’t personalize your messaging at scale. 

If you need proof that email marketing is critical for a brand’s success, look no further than the data. 

• Email marketing revenue is estimated to reach almost $11 billion by the end of 2023.
• For every $1 spent on email marketing, $44 is made in return.
• 79% of marketers place email marketing in their top 3 most effective channels for marketing, and more than 90% of businesses say email marketing is important to their company’s overall success.

Now, imagine what you can do with those numbers by personalizing email? Creating an email marketing strategy built around email personalization has been shown to drive engagement and revenue. 

And in a world where it’s increasingly difficult to stand out from the competition, personalization is an ace card you can play. 

Diving into performative personalization

One reason why the Zembula platform makes email marketing so effective is due to performative personalization. Our approach is data-driven. We make it easy for you to find the signal in the noise, the data that matters to your readers, and, more importantly, drives them to take action. 

Performative personalization goes beyond using generic personalization for the sake of it — that doesn’t move the needle. Instead, our AI-powered tools use consumer data and behavior to identify the personalized messaging most likely to generate more revenue for your brand.

The key behind this is our Campaign Decision Engine. Once you’re on the platform, getting started is simple. Connect your data sources, set your display parameters, and add a snippet of code to your email templates. That’s all it takes — from there, we do the rest.

The Campaign Decision Engine runs through your display parameters, reader shopping and behavioral data, and then determines the best personalized message to display in the email. Now, every email you send has personalized Smart Banners™ and Smart Blocks™ individualized to every reader. That helps drive engagement and revenue. 

With performative personalization driving the way, you have a new email personalization approach focused on getting results. 

Introducing the Smart Banner™ and Smart Block™

You know how important it is to personalize every email you send, but how can you do it automatically? The answer lies with Smart Banners™ and Smart Blocks™.

These dynamic content blocks allow you to personalize every email you send. From abandoned cart updates to loyalty points rewards and product recommendations, now you have multiple areas in every email for personalized revenue-driving messaging. 

With Smart Banners™, you have a built-in message pool ready to deploy to your readers, including:

• Abandoned cart
• Abandoned browse
• Shipment tracking
• Birthday and anniversary
• Loyalty
• Welcome

Our amazing customers have seen a 10-17% lift in revenue from emails displaying Smart Banners™ and have used Smart Blocks™ for secondary calls to action and additional personalization throughout.

When your email is personalized from top to bottom, it opens up a world of possibilities to tailor messaging to every reader. That helps boost clicks and conversions, improves the customer journey, and helps build long-term relationships with your readers.

Email personalization in action

You know how important personalizing your emails is, so now it’s time to check out a few examples of using Smart Banners™ and Smart Blocks™ to take your emails to the next level. 

Here are a few of our favorite examples. 

One of the best ways to re-engage customers and drive revenue is through a cart abandonment campaign. But with Smart Banners™, you can turn any email into an abandoned cart message. Add in personalized animation, and you have a compelling message that’s hard to ignore.

Another great use for Smart Banners™ is to target your loyalty program members. We love this approach from our client, Hat Heaven. They use a Smart Banner™ that takes cart abandonment to a new level, highlighting how shoppers can cash in their loyalty points to save.

We already highlighted name personalization as a key way to personalize your emails. Using the name everywhere approach, personalize both Smart Banners™ and Smart Blocks™ with the reader’s name, calling attention and demonstrating more value.

Smart Blocks™ are the perfect real estate for personalized product recommendations. Again, using performative personalization, emails pull in customer data and automatically display recommended products your customers will likely love based on their browsing and purchase history.

You can also use Smart Blocks™ to make your emails move with personalized animation. In this example, a Smart Block™ can expand on an abandoned cart message by showing rotating product images of the item left behind.

Another underutilized way to personalize emails? Package tracking updates. These help customers know where their items are, since the data updates at the moment-of-open. And it can help reduce where is my order calls, saving your customer support team time and energy. 

Ready to go all in on email personalization?

We’d love to help. With Zembula, your email marketing is automated. You don’t have to disrupt your processes and workflows, start and stop campaigns, and tinker with code. 

Instead, we do all the heavy lifting for you. Your brand delivers incredibly personalized emails your customers will love. And your marketing team can focus on creating strategies that move the needle and improve the customer experience.

Interested in learning more? Get in touch. One of our email marketing experts will show you how Zembula can make a difference for both you and your customers.

Click here to request a demo.