Dear Valued Blog Reader.
… how boring was that. If this was one of dozens of emails you receive daily, you’d probably be long gone by now.
Email Campaigns with personalised subject lines, or opening titles, are 27% more likely to be interacted with, and our research has shown a staggering 740% Return on Investment when custom (segmented) campaigns are used.
The real success comes in when we accept that an opening title of “Dear Michael” simply isn’t enough. It helps, sure, but a name is just a name. We need to target your campaign far deeper than the opening tag line – but where do we even begin?
The biggest struggle by far is not the effort to set this all up, but to have the data in the first place. We scanned all our customers databases for what types of Custom Fields are being used, are there was a direct link between success of the campaigns in their account and the amount of detail they had on each recipient.
Those with just the email address had lower open and interaction rates compared to those who had Name, Gender and Location.
The work starts with the way you capture your data. Best bet is to make use of our Subscribe Forms and Custom Fields, on your website or signup page, to capture this data directly into your account – like below:
Now you’ve got some basic data, but how do we use it? Some things are clear to use, like First Name, but how do we use Gender and Location? It would be weird to have the Email Campaign start with “Dear Michael. As a Male living in Johannesburg…” – that’s not natural. Let’s use our data to influence the campaign behind the scenes.
Firstly, we need to segment our lists. We use the Segment Feature to split our lists up. We can use the data captured in the signup form, and perhaps extra data from our Invoicing System to come up with two segments: “Top Spenders – Male” and “Top Spenders – Female”.
Now let’s use our TouchBasePro account, and Template Builder, to target these genders with top of the range products, customised to their gender. Check the example, below:
Why have we done this? We could email our entire base, sure – but in this example we’re selling an expensive product so we want to target the people who spend lots of money with us – they’re more likely to be interested in these top shelf products. At the same time, we want them to be personalised to their gender as this example (clothing) works when splitting it across those lines.
There are some other examples we could use, based on the data we have for our customers:
- Fathers Day mailer to subscribers younger than 30.
- 20% sale at our Sandton Store to subscribers in Johannesburg.
- Run a sports bar? Rugby images for “Language: Afrikaans” or Cricket images for “Language: The Queens English”
- Image of a Dog vs Image of a Cat when emailing our customers for the Vet we run, based on their records.
I’m getting carried away with these ideas, but you get the point.
At the end of the day – personalise, segment and target your bulk emailing. We’ve looked at every single campaign sent out through our system and can definitely say that customers who take advantage of these features, which are ready and waiting to be used, have a greater success rate from their mailings.
