We have touched upon the subject of personalisation very briefly in our post, How Should Auto Dealerships Be Using Email Marketing In 2017?, however it felt right to expand on this idea as a recent report from Episerver about the ‘State of Digital Commerce’ has found that 62% of marketers aren't even using personalisation in their communications with customers!
Why Should I Use Personalisation?
- Customers will be much less likely to delete the email immediately, bounce from it quickly or simply disregard the information as irrelevant due to poor target segmentation - the key to this is generally a compelling headline which taps into the assumed wants/needs of the targeted customer
- It encourages customer satisfaction with feelings of exclusivity, as if the marketer has specially considered their communications to the recipient
- It has been found that a personalised email with personalised landing pages can lead to an increase in click-through rates and conversions, as specific vehicles and services can be made readily available to the customer to save them time
- The trickiest part of any personalised campaign is acquiring the customer’s data and their consent for it to be used for marketing communications. This information needs to be used wisely, as the accuracy of your content will depend on how well you segment your customer using their data.
Segment Your Data For Accuracy
Segmenting your customer data into interest groups and different demographics - such as location, job titles, age, or their stage in the sales pipeline if possible - will ensure that your emails are as relevant and personalised as possible. You can use your respective analytics tools, email marketing tools and CRM systems to do the following:
- Insert data such as the customer’s name, the car that they drive, etc. into the headline, body text, call-to-action buttons and more
- This is where it is vital to know your customer, remembering to note as many details as possible about their personal preferences, as well as things such as their reason for purchasing the vehicle that they did from you.
Try A/B Testing Your Emails
You could even try some A/B testing of your emails to find the layout that your customers seem to prefer. This also ensures that you are staying current and, again, using the best design to capture the attention and engagement of your recipients. A/B testing can also:
- Help you to strike the balance between content that can delight, with information that is highly relevant, with content that is inaccurate or - frankly - invasive!
- Give you an opportunity to test a selection of different headlines, your copy and general tone of voice of the copy itself. Log what is successful for future campaigns
- Hide or reveal sections of content to increase relevance - i.e. you could have a section of copy which talks about your latest commercial vehicles, or your best value-for-money family cars, to ensure that the content is relevant for whoever reads it.
Have a look and see how Bluesky can help you with your email marketing campaigns to get started with personalisation!