2.4 Personalised E-mails

Welcome to vegan cooking 101. Today we’re going to learn how to make the healthiest kale smoothies out there. Oh wait sorry, wrong class. 

Let’s try this again. 

Welcome to personalised e-mails. In this chapter, we’ve talked about basic e-mails, drip e-mails and the money-makers – sales e-mails. 

But if you really want to show-off your new skills as an e-mail marketer, you’re gonna need personalised e-mails. Like the name very obviously suggests is when you customise your e-mails to the person reading – typically based on their behaviour or preference. 

These e-mails are highly contextual to the user which means they’re way more effective than a regular broadcast e-mail. Think of it like having a conversation with a friend as opposed to regular e-mails which is like speaking to a huge crowd. 

So, why have personalised e-mails? 

Well, every person has a unique context with how they relate to the brand and no two are the same. They have different needs and different reasons to be on your mailing list. The more you personalise them to the person and their context, the more engagement you are going to drive.

And to understand personalised e-mails better, we need to rewind back to e-mail the tools. In the first chapter, we talked about how brands use these tools to do all their work. It’s like having your own personal robot. You tell the tool what you want it to do and it does it for you. 

At a basic level, these tools allow you to create lists, send e-mails and schedule e-mails to go out at specific times to specific people. But these tools can do way more - including being able to tell you how people have responded or behaved with your e-mails. 

This means 

1. They can tell when someone has opened an e-mail.
2. Or when someone has opened and then clicked on a call-to-action in the e-mail
3. They can even tell when someone has opened your e-mail, clicked on a call-to-action, visited your website, and then clicked on something on the website.

And there’s way more to this but you get the idea. 

Now, this is obviously a more advanced e-mail marketing feature, so we’re going to go into it in more detail in the next chapter, but for now let’s go over a few different ways you can use this information to personalise your e-mail.

1. You can send them reminders if they forget to open certain important e-mails.
2. You can see what topics they are interested in based on the e-mails they open and send them more e-mails on that topic.
3. You can see what formats of content they most like to consume - video vs blog vs ebooks and send them more of those kinds of content.
4. You can observe what time of the day they open their e-mails and send them e-mails around that time.
5. You can even send them a high engagement or sales e-mail if they’ve been engaging with several e-mails in a row. 

Let’s take a few examples:

This e-mail from Charles Kelley is a great example of how e-mails personalised emails work. The e-mail appreciates and recognises the user as being a top listener. It thanks the user and gives them access to something exclusive. In addition to that, the email itself is from Charles Kelley, the front runner of the band. Any fan receiving this e-mail is going to be pretty stoked about this.

Here is another example:

Do is an app that helps users schedule, plan and run effective meetings. In this e-mail, 'The Do Team' reaches out to a particular user because they stopped using the app. The e-mail does a great job of showing the user that the brand is aware of their app usage which makes them feel cared for. 

It gives the person an option to start using Do again or reach out if they have any issues or questions. 

Now, here’s the icing on the cake. The automation feature in your e-mail marketing tool takes away all the manual work when it comes to personalised e-mails. So once you set it up, the automation aka your personal robot takes care of it for you.