The power of data for personalisation is becoming more and more imperative in marketing campaign activity, especially within the email channel.
With inboxes being flooded with marketing messages across all sectors, it is important to try and make your emails stand out from the crowd. There are many tactics to entice your customers to open emails, but once they open it’s crucial the content is engaging and relevant.
Effective email personalisation that keeps engagement high and subscribers willing to open your latest campaign cuts across the whole email; the subject line, the copy, the imagery – everything!
Use customer data to your advantage in every campaign
One big advantage is being able to personalise the content of your emails to your customer and prospect base, as this will ultimately enable you to provide them with more relevant content, which in turn will increase their engagement with your brand and ultimately increase the chances of them converting.
There are many ways brands can personalise their marketing campaign activity using the data they hold from their customer and prospect base.
Browsing behaviour – such as products viewed but not purchased
Having the ability to pull in content that is relevant to the recipient based on their previous browsing activity, such as products viewed and products abandoned.
RedEye not only use this data to power behavioural activity such as abandon basket or abandon product, but we also include this content within our clients tactical marketing campaigns too, to acknowledge the fact that these customers have completed an action on the site.
Transactional data – a perfect match for loyalty-driving campaigns
Including content within the marketing message relevant to a customer’s previous purchase habits helps increase relevancy and adds that little touch of affinity between the brand and the customer.
RedEye supports many of our clients using this type of data, particularly for those clients that offer loyalty schemes to their customers.
First we include previous purchase history and secondly we also create custom calculations and dynamically pull these into the message to illustrate things such as; total cost savings, or loyalty points earned etc.
These particularly work well within service messages or loyalty renewal campaigns.
Engagement data – use this to communicate with customers on the channel they prefer
If you hold a full history of every marketing communication sent to your customer base across every channel then use this to inform your campaigns!
At RedEye we are able to build up a view of how engaged customers are with each channel and in turn we can adopt a fully optimised engagement strategy to maximise the opportunity and deploy campaigns to customers based on their preferred channel.
This not only increases engagement but also reduces the chance of customer opting out of marketing communications altogether.
Device data – tailor you messaging based on where your customers are engaging
By tracking customer engagement by device, whether that’s from onsite purchasing, online browsing or how the customer engages with the marketing campaigns you send and deploy, all this data can be fed back into your single customer view.
You can then apply learnings based on behaviour and optimise future campaign programmes as a result.
For example, if we know a customer only ever uses their mobile device to engage or purchase but always chooses click and collect, we can send content that is specifically relevant to their mobile with a creative geared around making the collection experience completely frictionless by removing non-relevant content.
Predictive data – start using AI to do the heavy lifting for you
The most advance feature of data driven personalisation is predictive modelling by utilising all the data sources you hold including behavioural, transactional and engagement data.
Using statistical algorithms that power propensity models to intelligently predict the likelihood of an event occurring in the future to advance your campaigns like never before and wow your customers with relevant content.
At RedEye we have models that cover all stages of the customer journey from prospect conversion to second purchase, through to predicting customer likely to lapse.
Preference centre data – don’t miss out on asking customers to self profile
In addition to all of the above, offering your customers a preference centre to capture their likes is a great source for personalised content, whether that’s brands, categories, holiday destinations or hobbies/interests.
All of which can be used and incorporated into the customer journey in order for you to tailor content for all subsequent marketing activities.
Just remember the golden rule – never ignore preference data! If a customer has taken time to answer questions on what they prefer to receive you must follow through. The disappointment of receiving generic campaigns when they have selected specifics will leave a worse impression than if you had not asked for preferences at all.
📕 Related reading: In our blog post about contextually-driven personalisation you can learn how to incorporate personalised content into the email creative using interactive content. Many of these content blocks are powered by the use of personalised data detailed above.
Complement personalisation with the following…
There are a number of additional content ideas that work well using personalised data, including:
- Payment banners: Pulling in the preferred payment type option using previous transactional data
- Product Recommendations: As well as including basket content, you can also look to incorporate alternative products to promote cross-sell / up-sell opportunities
- App download: Being able to identify customers who have or haven’t downloaded the app, we can then personalise the email to promote it
- eGiftcard: If your customers hold a valid giftcard with funds available, this can be referenced within the email content to entice the customer to purchase using those remaining funds
- Brand affinity: Pull in brand banners for recipients who have either browsed or purchased a particular brand
Implementation of data driven personalisation is easier than you think
Whichever type of data driven personalisation you choose to implement, making the decision to build your communications around personalisation will be the most effective strategy.
It’s proven to not only increase click rates and sessions, but also conversion and revenue from the email channel.
Many aspects of data-driven personalisation are easy to achieve, it’s all in the data we hold and the segmentation that we build which can then all be dynamically pulled into the email creative.
Now That’s What I Call Marketing Automation
Customer driven personalisation features as Track 4 in our latest guide; Now That’s What I Call Marketing Automation which showcases some of the best uses of marketing automation which includes these other campaigns…
⭕ Welcome journeys
⭕ Re engagement emails
⭕ Contextually driven personalisation
⭕ Back in stock emails
⭕ Replenishment emails
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