Email Personalization and Loyalty

Why is Email Personalization Important?

Personalization is far from a new trend in marketing, but there’s a big gap between what companies should be doing and what they are doing.

Most companies know personalization is a powerful way to connect with customers—both to bolster brand loyalty and drive purchases—but many aren’t quite sure how to go about introducing it into their customer loyalty efforts.

With some of the most complex personalization capabilities of any marketing channel, email makes a solid foundation for a personalized loyalty program. Here are a few of Annex Cloud and Maropost’s top tips to help you get started:

Start with Email Segmentation:

If you aren’t already, it’s time to start segmenting your loyalty program email list. Some starter segments to consider are things like geography or gender, but with the custom segmentation capabilities of email marketing tools, you can get way more detailed.

While you should always segment by who your customers are, it’s also helpful to segment by what they do. Segmenting by behavior—including transactions and email engagement, to name a few—ensures that the emails customers receive are relevant.

For loyalty programs, one of the most effective ways to segment is according to loyalty tier. By dividing your list down to the tier, each level of loyalty can receive the messages and offers exclusive to their group—to strengthen loyalty over time.

With a powerful enough segmentation engine, you can even segment within tiers for more personalized messaging, so subscribers in the same tier can get different emails depending on their gender, location, and more.

Whether you start with just one rule—or a complex combination of rules—segmentation has a huge impact on improving loyalty. What’s important is to group customers in a way that makes sense for your goals, then create relevant messaging to reach each segment.

Uncover Customer History:

Personalized email loyalty programs can do a lot more than just responding to behavior—they can also shape it. Using web tracking combined with email marketing lets you take data on browsing and purchase history to push customers further down the funnel.

To take this one step further, you can even use purchase history to identify former frequent buyers—then send loyalty incentives to get their attention again.

But even if a customer hasn’t made a purchase, there’s still plenty you can do. By combining web tracking with email marketing, you can send emails suggesting purchases—and reminding customers of the points they can earn or the rewards they’ll receive.

Web tracking also lets you see when customers are thinking about your brand, so you can promote your loyalty program and new offers at the right time.

Automate Email Engagement:

But personalization takes effort, so you’ll need to automate as much as possible. For personalization that scales, automate everything from behavioral triggers for abandoned cart emails, to earned reward notifications, to loyalty offers, to personalized product and content recommendations.

With loyalty programs, one of your biggest automation opportunities comes from personalized product and content recommendation emails. Not every customer is going to want every reward you have to offer. Tailoring loyalty offers based on purchase behavior lets you send out emails that appeal to everyone.

Another easy way to create personalized loyalty emails is dynamic content. Using dynamic content, you can send a single email that changes according to the audience. So, names, locations, and reward offers are all reflected in a single email.

But successful personalization isn’t just about what you send. It’s about when you send, too. Your loyalty members all have different schedules, so your emails should too. Email marketing now has AI-powered scheduling options that can send not just based on engagement or time zone, but on more complex factors like typical engagement time and typical purchase time.

Conclusion:

Even small things like tailoring automatic reward notifications to include a first name and some other personal information have a huge impact on making your audience feel important. After all, that’s what loyalty programs are all about. The more personalized your loyalty emails, the more likely your audience is to purchase and engage—helping your loyalty program to thrive.

About Annex Cloud 

Since 2010, Annex Cloud has provided more than 250 leading brands and retailers with the ability to engage tens of millions of customers one-to-one at scale.