Picture this: a generic email hits your inbox and without so much as a second glance, you’ve deleted it. It’s the sort of reflex that gives marketing managers nightmares, but it’s a daily occurrence for many of us. Typical email open rates sit around 18-21% but, with the right approach to your audience, it can be up to 43%.
The reason so many campaigns or communications miss these targets is that generic, impersonal ‘blast’ emails don’t resonate with customers. Because of that, they get ignored, filtered out or trigger unsubscription. For businesses looking to reach customers where they are — their inbox — there is a better way: email personalisation.
By paying closer attention to the unique attributes, demographic data and trends of your business’s audience — segmentation — it’s possible to increase the reach of email campaigns, achieving results of more than 3X the revenue per recipient than unsegmented.
It doesn’t matter how many people sign up to a mailing list if they don’t engage with the email. It might seem logical to send blast emails (generic emails to a full mailing list), but these are largely generic, not based on the insights or tailored content that we know leads to increased open rates. Worst of all, blast emails might not get opened at all, with issues of deliverability (being marked as spam or just being ignored) condemning them to oblivion.
Instead, switched-on businesses find success using fewer, more targeted emails that make customers feel noticed, special and more than just a number. Take luxury apparel and homewares brand Jenni Kayne, for example: the business slashed its email quantity by over 40% but still grew its email revenue by nearly 15%, swapping a generic strategy for emails aimed at specific customer segments.
Rather than three emails each day, subscribers received one based on their preferred shopping habits — something which was more aligned to the customers themselves.
This strategy provides a few valuable lessons:
Achieving email goals like high open rates, great conversion and customer loyalty is all about personally understanding customers and offering great content. For content, there are typically four ways to go: content that entertains or captivates readers, educates them, engages them to interact, or inspires/motivates them. To really craft an email like this, though, first requires an understanding of the customer through insights and data.
Take the case of Australian swimwear brand Kulani Kinis. Using an integration with social media plug-in Gatsby to send data insights through Klaviyo, owners Dani Aktins and Alex Babich have been able to capture the Instagram handles of their influencer audience, understanding factors like individual follower numbers.
Armed with this data, Kulani Kinis then crafts targeted emails with content that incentivises and rewards influencers to share the brand’s content, generating a mutual benefit.
This is an example of segmentation — splitting your customer base into groups that share a common theme or value. Segmented data is highly valuable, and your business might focus on:
An intelligent marketing automation platform like Klaviyo is able to capture this data from customers and target your business’s ideal customer with tailored email content that is more likely to achieve business goals like increased sales, brand awareness or engagement.
Taking advantage of software integrations can be a powerful way to collect data. In the case of sustainable toilet paper brand Who Gives a Crap, customer data from platforms like Recharge, Malomo and Unbounce is all able to be unified within Klaviyo, providing rich insights and customer segmentation data that has given the business 640% growth in email list numbers over the past three years.
When it comes to using this data, don’t be afraid to lean on AI-assisted tools, which can use captured customer data and other insights to ensure that emails are highly effective. AI tools through platform like Klaviyo can include:
It’s also important to remember that, regardless of the tools you use, the type of data collected is important. Customer-first data, ethically collected, is the best way to go.
One example would be offering the customer consent for data collection about their behaviour on your website or ecommerce platform, then bringing this data into a platform like Klaviyo to look at metrics like average order value, subscription activity and message engagement. This then informs segmentation data for future email communications.
Personal relationships bloom with care, understanding and effort — the same goes for emails. Just reaching an inbox is no guarantee of sales, conversions, brand loyalty or even being read. Rather, email success hinges on well-crafted emails that offer something to the customer, whether it’s a well-chosen discount code, an interesting new product or a gentle reminder to return to an abandoned cart. With Klaviyo, it’s easy to find a deeper relationship with customers, leaving the old blast email behind in favour of a more personal email experience.
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