With an ever increasing number of emails hitting our inboxes every day, customers’ expectations of email campaigns are higher than ever, and with more competition to get their emails noticed, businesses need to ensure their email are targeted, creative and personal (The Marketer, 2012 and Smith, 2014).
According to Smith (2014) 64% of people prefer emails that are personal, and one study found that personalised promotional emails are 6 times more likely to increase transaction rates than non-personalised. In addition, personalised emails are 29% more likely to be opened, however a massive 70% of brands still fail to utilise their customer data and personalise their emails (Durkin, 2014 and Gesenhues, 2014).
So with so much to gain from it, what’s putting them off?
If done well, personalisation can help to build a trusted relationship between your company and your customers, improving general satisfaction and enabling customer retention (Smith, 2011, Durkin, 2014 and The Marketer, 2015).
Arguably the simplest way to personalise an email is to include the receivers name in the subject line, which increases the open rate as users believe it has come from a trusted source (Durkin, 2014).