5 Personalisation Strategies That Work for Marketing Automation

Given the rise of automation and personalisation tools, it will come as no surprise that personalisation now goes way beyond greeting recipients by their first name. Instant gratification is key online; grabbing your subscribers’ attention will take much more creative personalisation strategies to help your brand stand out from the crowd.

With today’s personalisation and marketing automation tools, you can specifically target individuals with content that immediately engages them – and all without breaking a sweat.

When it comes to relevance, sending emails based on the location of individual recipients will result in better engagement rates. This is especially true for event invites. If a contact resides in NSW but receives invites to events located in QLD and VIC, they’re likely going to disengage from future event invites from your brand.

Instead, use personalisation to ensure that your event invite content is dynamic. Send one invite to your audience, but have the copy change based on the location of each recipient. This way, your recipients are invited to events in the location they actually reside in; making your brand’s invites targeted, relevant, and valuable.

If you’re a marketer, or have experience with marketing strategy – then you’re probably familiar with the idea of buyer personas. These are personas built to better understand the type of person your brand is trying to target. Once you understand the demographic, wants and problems of your audience members, it becomes easier to target them with email campaigns which are hyper-relevant to them; and thus increase engagement and conversions.

By collecting data on your recipients by asking them to self-identify their interests (via surveys or a Preference Center style subscription form) you are able to create email campaigns that are personalised according to the unique self-identified personas of your recipients. 

You can achieve identity based campaigns by either creating multiple campaigns based on personas which are then sent to your database (segmented by said persona), and/or you can use personalisation and dynamic content to create one campaign which appears with the unique content relevant to each individual recipient.

A lot of time is spent sending repetitive emails to clients from individual members of your staff. For example, routine emails to clients from their respective account managers. With personalisation, you could automate these emails, have them send at the right time to the right client, and have it sent from – and signed off by – the staff member (e.g. account manager) familiar to them.

Let’s use the previously mentioned ‘renewal notice’ campaign as an example. Not only will this email send to a client when the renewal reminder is most apt, but you can also use personalisation fields to populate the ‘from’ field of the email, as well as the email signature, with the account manager familiar to the contact. This frees up valuable time for your account managers, without compromising on the human-to-human feel of your administrative processes. Your clients will feel they are being looked after by real people, whilst your account managers can spend their time on more important tasks. Everybody wins.

Whilst the most common way to use personalisation in email marketing is by greeting contacts by their first name, as we’ve illustrated above, it’s not the only way to increase the relevance, and thus engagement, of your marketing campaigns. Get creative with your personalisation strategies, and see how personalisation can save you time and money, whilst improving the experience of your audience.