Personalization has a problem…many marketers are terrified of it.

What we’re seeing is a lot of overcomplicating, avoidance, and easing FOMO with an arbitrary {first_name} somewhere in the email.

If that’s personalization, it’s the kindergarten kind. (No offense)

You might be wondering why a deliverability expert cares so much about this.

It’s because deliverability is now directly related to subscriber engagement, and, in a world of saturated promotional emails, subscriber engagement is more and more becoming about who can reach the subscriber in a personally relevant way.

That’s right…personalization is on its way to becoming a key component of successful deliverability.

As we face a future that forces us out of our safe, bulk-promotion marketing boxes and into building a truly personalized email experience, we have to find a way to make personalization easy, accessible, and automated within our strategies.

But that’s the beautiful thing, it already is.

Understanding personalization

The true power of personalization lies in its scope.

When you think about a personalized email experience, you might imagine complex, unique email generated every single time, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

In truth, nothing has to be outright unique; it just has to be personally relevant in some way to the subscriber each time.

The varying degrees of personalization:

1:1

• Content that includes personal data or transactional information

• Think of a receipt, account/subscription confirmation, etc.

Mid-level

• Content related to tracked interests and activities in the past

• Think of abandoned carts, “related upsell” content, etc.

Low level

• Content related to common subscriber lifecycle content

• Think of preference update outreaches, re-engagement, special promotions, etc.

When marketers think of what a personalized email experience is, they might imagine a 1:1 message tied to a relevant promotional strategy.

What an overwhelming idea.

Most of the time, 1:1 personalization is not beneficial and may even receive a negative perception due to its direct, personal-data heavy approach.

People like to be known, but they don’t want to feel watched, case in point - do you remember the Facebook Beacon debacle?

The softer approach of mid-level and low-level personalization are more effective, they help subscribers feel the love and this leads to wins (or leads!) Let’s dive in:.

How to build a winning (and automated) personalization strategy

(tip: Treat the following as a framework and use it to surface more opportunities for personalization.)

1. Identify common purchaser lifecycles

From one-off discount hunters or accidental shoppers to lifelong buyers, look for common experiences of discovery, engagement, and conversion with your products. (Don’t try to uncover ALL of them out the gate, but begin practicing with some of the major ones starting out)

Understand the key components of those emotional journeys and key identifiers that separate one from another, and evaluate where you can step-in to help.

We all want to believe we’re unique in everything we do, but the truth is that we all tend to follow a few similar patterns in our journey. 

The details may be unique but the pattern is usually similar.

Example: If you’re selling a product with various sizes available, and you see visitors frequently browsing / selecting different sizes, try offering them a size guide via email or pop-up capture with a link to sizing information

2. Identify and resolve missing data opportunities

As you work through step one, think about what data points you could track or uncover with other automation efforts that would help.

This doesn’t have to be directly personal data, like birthday or social security numbers (please don’t ask for that), but is something along the lines of a common activity in engaging with your organization.

Think about which ad or form they came through, did they visit your website directly or through an affiliate, what types of things did they look at, what emails did they engage with and how, etc. All of these attributes can help establish a pattern of behaviors regardless of how un-personal some of it is.

Review your findings and implement ways to automatically track these behaviors using a CDP (Customer Data Platform).

Example: The location of a user might affect content you present to them. While the east coast US is freezing, the west coast might be experiencing elevated temperatures and drought.. Segment your audiences accordingly. Don’t try selling fleece jackets to people dealing with a heat wave!

3. Build strategies that utilize these new data-points in the context of the common purchaser lifecycles

Once you understand some of the purchaser lifecycles and have your tracking of key data-points in place, it’s time to identify opportunities where your comms can help subscribers understand their own needs and desires and more easily make decisions.

Do you need to provide testimonials, demonstrating how your solution solves their pain point? 

How about a nurture sequence that drip feeds a comprehensive overview of familiar pain points and a well-rounded solution approach? 

Or do they simply need that extra 10% discount to nudge into the value they’re looking for?

These are just examples for identifying engaging and relevant touchpoints to engage subscribers in key decision moments.

4. Build automations to implement these touch-points in real time

Now that you’ve got everything you need, it’s time to build the automations.

To really take advantage of this, you want to utilize a platform that is able to not only trigger an email or SMS based on an action, but one that can allow for further branches as the user takes different actions and decisions.

Try to keep it simple at first with a single trigger per flow and 3-4 branches within.

Make sure your platform and automations are tracking conversions and remove subscribers from nurture flows (and move them to post purchase flows) when its time.

How personalization can save subscribers

Once you’ve followed the above steps for helping your promotional content, it’s time to do the same for subscriber lifecycles 

Sometimes subscribers go a long time without engaging with your business.

Nurturing conversion is important but retaining subscribed customers as well as maintaining strong email deliverability, are also important considerations. In a nutshell, there should be no one night stands in marketing. You want to keep in touch with your prospects as well as your subscribers - for the best revenue outcomes as well as the best deliverability performance. 

Start by identifying:

• Key touchpoints with the most engagement as well as weak areas for improvement.

• Gaps in communications and content opportunities.

• Frequency - do certain cohorts show more or less engagement with more or less messaging?

Utilize this knowledge to build and iterate nurture content and re-engagement automations. Identify key touchpoints to maintain engagement. These touchpoints could be events aligned to tracked behaviours, geo location, seasonality, current affairs and more.

Update send frequency and content triggers to align with lifecycle triggers such as subscription events, or particular activities such as ‘user views cancellation info page’ or ‘user views pricing page’.

A subscriber’s experience with your brand should reflect their current state of interest and relationship. When interest is lost (i.e. less interactions recorded), frequency should likely lower while relevancy of content should grow higher.

By doing this, not only will you protect your deliverability, but you will also retain more repeat buyers than ever before.

Conclusion

While each industry and brand has its own relationship with their audiences, the strategy outlined here can be used by any marketer to help identify develop simple, effective, executions which leverage personalization to its greatest potential.

It also creates a foundation to iterate and improve in a continuous cycle.

Assign a percentage of your working week to following these steps (maybe just a couple of hours to start!) and within a year, your efforts will become more personal and automated, your content more relevant and engaging and your inbox, bottom line and deliverability metrics will be in a better place too!