By: Emmy Russell, OT Intern
Personalized email marketing is a great way to leverage consumer data. Understanding your audience’s preferences, demographics, and engagement is key to providing tailored and relevant content. It’s also a great way to connect with your audience on a more meaningful level. Personalized email marketing is not without its warnings, though. There are appropriate and inappropriate times to use it. Here’s when not to use personalized email marketing:
When You Don’t Have Helpful Content
Personalized email marketing revolves around providing your audience relevant and helpful content. Content without a purpose is doomed to fail. Your personalization tactics should resonate with your audience and add value to your strategy. Sending a general email with the recipient’s name in the subject line or greeting does not constitute proper personalization. Instead, focus on providing email content that teaches something, offers insight, or brings attention to exclusive offers or events that your audience cares about.
When You Send Emails Too Frequently
Regardless of the relevance or quality of your content, sending it out too frequently can negatively impact your marketing strategy. It’s a common belief that sending out emails every day increases the opportunities for your audience to engage with your business. What this really does is ensure your thoughtfully crafted content ends up ignored, in the spam folder, or resulting in opt-outs. Although you may effectively use your consumer data to create impactful content, if you annoy your audience by constantly sending them emails, you’re working against yourself.
When Your Personalized Content is Too Personal
When you acquire user data, be careful not to misuse it. Avoid including information in your emails that is more specific to that person than necessary. Content that is too on-the-nose is invasive to your reader’s privacy. Have you ever received an ad for something after having a conversation with someone about it? Creepy, right? That’s how your audience feels when you use their information to make their personalized emails a little too personal.
When Your Subject Lines are Questionable
Subject lines are the first thing your audience interacts with. Again, placing the recipient’s name in the subject line doesn’t automatically mean it’s good personalized email marketing. Subject lines crowded with over exaggerated verbiage, punctuation, all caps, emojis, or misleading phrases end up where? The spam folder. This is because they are unprofessional and visually unappealing. The last thing you want is for your brand to appear untrustworthy. Instead, opt for a subject line that packs a punch. Make it intriguing, pique the reader’s curiosity, and accurately represent the overall message of the piece — without all the over exaggerations.
When You Don’t Just Talk to Your Audience
Tone is everything when communicating with your audience. Depending on the form of communication, the tone changes. Emails are generally considered a more casual way of communicating. Don’t push your audience away with emails that are too formal in tone. Nobody wants to be lectured at or bored by uninspiring language. Instead, imagine you’re telling them a story in a casual conversation. Just talk to them.
Before You Have a Pleasing Visual Design
Emails are not exempt from visual design. In fact, visual design plays a huge role in whether or not your reader trusts what you say. Don’t put in the effort of tailoring your message to meet specific audience needs if you haven’t designed your emails to at least look nice. People click away from emails that aren’t formatted properly or don’t align with the aesthetics of a particular brand — make sure yours isn’t one of these emails.
Before Testing
Spare you and your team the embarrassment of sending an untested email cluttered with mistakes. Even the most beautifully curated personalized emails can hurt the brand’s reputation if they are full of oversights. Send out test emails to ensure they display and function correctly. Do this for both mobile and desktop. Fix issues that may arise before they reach your audience’s inbox. Do yourself this favor to preserve your brand’s image.
Unsure how to develop the perfect personalized email marketing strategy? Here at On Target, we know just how to help. Call us at (407) 830-4550 or fill out our contact form. Let’s work together to grow your business and develop your relationship with your customers!
