Overview
Have you heard of personalizing your marketing content? You probably have, it’s just adding First Name to your email, right? WRONG! First Name personalization is fine and dandy, but there are other ways to personalize, too! We’ll give you a quick overview, but definitely check out our on-demand webinar to learn more details.
What is Personalization
First, let’s define what personalization is for marketing. Personalization is the practice of customizing marketing efforts and messages to suit the individual preferences, behaviors, and characteristics of each target audience or even individual customer. It involves using data-driven insights to deliver highly relevant and targeted content.
There are a number of ways you can add personalization to your campaigns in Marketo.We’ll focus on personalization in email, but landing pages, web pages, and Dynamic Chat can all be personalized via Marketo as well.
Why use Personalization
Personalization makes your marketing campaigns more relevant to your target audience and makes them feel like you know them. Here are a few benefits of using personalization in your email marketing:
- Increased Open Rates. Personalized email subject lines can generate 50% higher open rates compared to non-personalized ones1
- Reduction in Unsubscribe Rates: Personalized email campaigns can reduce unsubscribe rates by 28%2
- Higher Click-Through Rates (CTR): Personalized emails improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%3
Do these stats have you convinced to utilize personalization? We hope so, but before you start adding a bunch of personalization, you’ll want to make sure your data is ready.
What do I need to get started with Personalization?
Personalization is great, but you don’t want to add personalization to an email just to send it with “Hi UNKNOWN” instead of their name. Dirty data with misspellings or irrelevant information can lead to a bad customer experience. Auditing your data first will ensure it’s clean and ready to be pulled into your emails.
You don’t need to audit every single field in your instance though, that would take forever. Instead, identify the fields you’re most likely to use for personalization, like First Name and Last Name, Company Name, Country, or Language.
How can I use Personalization in email (more than just first name)
There are many ways that you can use personalization in email, but we’ll only look at a few to help get you started. You could use different kinds of tokens, like person tokens or program member tokens to customize your email with specific user data. There’s Email Script tokens that can pull in custom objects, API calls, or custom fields using Velocity Script. Email Script tokens can also be used with if-else statements to personalize the content of your email based on fields on the lead. Another option is to use dynamic content to personalize your email based on a segmentation in your database, like language, country, or job function/title.
Conclusion
Personalizing emails can be a great way to step up your email game when done correctly. Avoid embarrassing errors by checking your existing data for obvious things, like rude adjectives in lead names. If you’re new to personalization we recommend you start small and choose an email to personalize. Adding a lead’s first name to the email is a great place to start, but there are more options to personalize emails too! And don’t forget to fully QA your email and personalization method BEFORE you send.
Check out our on-demand webinar to learn even more helpful tips for getting started with email personalization!
Sources
1Campaign Monitor – Email Marketing Benchmarks 2022
2Email Marketing Benchmarks – MailChimp
3Data behind personalization – Experian
