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After talking about how big shot ecommerce websites are capturing massive amounts of leads by asking for your email, it’s time to cover some basics: how to send personalized emails.
We will cover in this article 3 major email providers: MailChimp, AWeber and Campaign Monitor.
Each email provider has a great streamlined flow of sending email campaigns, but each has its particularities. So we need to cover how you can send email campaigns in each and one of them; so if you are not already using one of these email providers, maybe we can give you a hand to see how easy it is to send your campaigns overall.
Before we go deep into the tutorials, let us agree on why sending personalized emails is a good thing.
3 Reasons why should you send personalized emails:
- You establish a shorter bridge between you and your prospects, in plain speak that means getting closer to the customer.
- You add relevance to your emails, especially when you are targeting leads that are affected by proximity to your stores, products or services.
- You are zooming in on your customer’s personality, because you are acknowledging the fact that you have a list full of people, not a list full of emails.
So yeah, I think that’s useful to think about personalizing a little bit your emails, so that you can improve the relationship with your customers, one campaign at a time.
MailChimp email personalization step by step
Step 1: Create a new campaign and format
Step 2: Write all the details MailChimp asks for
Step 3: Write the content including MERGE TAGS
The number and utility of MERGE TAGS depend on how detailed is the subscription form you are using or if you send a follow-up email in which you request more details about your prospect.
So, if you want a deep level of personalization, like city, home address or other details relevant for your business, you might consider creating a follow-up email to ask for more information.
This follow-up email will also help into in the list segmentation process.
Step 4: Preview, test and send – This is your moment of glory
No explaining is necessary for these next steps because MailChimp is making them very intuitive.
Step 5: Enjoy the personalized email
Personalize emails in AWeber
Step 1: Enter your AWeber account and create a new broadcast
Step 2: Choose your campaign type
For our example we are using the default HTML template.
Step 3: Build your newsletter and use "silhouette looking like" icon personalized
Step 4: Integrate what information you want to personalize
You have lots of options to choose from. In our example we personalized the email subject with a First Name, and we created a headline personalized on the City our prospect lives in.
Of course, if you want those personalizations to work, you need to have those fields in your subscription forms or you can use that follow-up email that I was talking about earlier.
Step 5: After you finished, preview your progress
It might seem a little childish to use these kind of gimmicks, but I found this extremely effective when sending out personalized campaigns, because I always get better results than normal, generic campaigns.
Step 6: Send a test, choose if you want sharing, and then send your campaign.
You don’t need print screens for the final steps because you already passed the hard stuff.
As you can see, AWeber also makes it pretty easy to send personalized emails, probably because they’re strong believers of personalization, and they strongly recommend you do this to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Using Campaign Monitor to send personalized emails
Step 1: Create a new campaign
Step 2: Choose your campaign type
Step 3: Complete campaign details & format
Step 3: Personalize, personalize, personalize
Step 4: Choose recipients, test and send.
As in any great and usable software application, these next steps don’t need print screens to explain what you have to do.
Step 5: Admire your personalized email
Sending a personalized email in Campaign Monitor is also flawless.
Final thoughts on sending personalized emails
As you can see, sending a personalized email is pretty straight forward and has different steps depending on which email provider are you using, but you can agree on the fact that is very easy to personalize, and make your emails more personal.
I must reiterate one piece of advice that I wrote earlier: ask for more details in a follow-up email from your new subscriber.
The reason is obvious: you need more data, in order to create targeted campaigns or highly targeted content in order to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing.
Offer something of value, a discount or a voucher, so that you can grab those credentials, may make your follow-up email more effective.
The more targeted and personalized your emails will be, the more income you will earn with your email marketing efforts, because people react better to offers that are closer to their personality.
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