How To Make Your Email Newsletters More Personal In 4 Easy Steps

If you want your email marketing to be successful, you need to get personal.

Email is a really powerful way to reach your customers. In fact, I’d even go as far as calling it the ultimate online marketing tool.

Unfortunately, that counts for nothing if you go about it the wrong way.

Let’s face it. No one likes to feel like a prospect. Unless you lay off the hard sell and get down and personal with your audience, you’re putting your emails on the fast track to the trash folder.

Luckily, email lends itself really well to personalisation, which is one of the reasons why it’s so effective (and no, it isn’t just because you can address all your subscribers by their first name).

It doesn’t require that much extra effort, either.

Here are a few tricks you can try out yourself.

Use Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are the cornerstone of any self-respecting marketing strategy, and that includes email.

I’ve written before about how buyer personas can help you make your content more valuable, so I won’t dwell on this point here. Suffice it to say that, without a solid buyer persona or two as a guide, you’re simply sending out a mishmash of information that may or may not be relevant and hoping it sticks.

That’s neither an efficient nor effective way to run a marketing campaign.

If you want your emails to work, you need to know your customers, understand how they think and learn what their pain points and objections are. Otherwise, you simply can’t create material that speaks to their needs.

Segment, Segment, Segment.

One of the great things about email is that it’s really easy to segment your subscriber list into different categories. Just ask the right questions on sign up and your email marketing software will do the rest.

Segmenting can improve your stats dramatically, and with good reason.

For one, you can send your emails at different times of the day.

Timing can have a significant effect on your email’s chances of being opened and read, so sending email at different times of the day is really useful, especially if your customers live in different time zones.

You’ll also be able to better target your emails, and even send specific offers only to those people on your list who are likely to be interested.

This is a win-win situation. You’ll get a better response to your promotions; while the people on your list who aren’t interested won’t be bummed into unsubscribing because they’re sick of your irrelevant offers.

Get A Real Reply-To Address

If you use a no reply address to send out your marketing emails, you should stop it right now.

Unless you’re a huge, well-known business like, say, Amazon or Ebay, a no reply addresses just comes across as impersonal and a little bit spammy (actually, let’s be honest, no reply emails from large companies are kind of annoying too).

You shouldn’t be afraid to use your real address to send out emails.

As with any other marketing, email newsletters are all about starting a conversation and creating a genuine connection. Using your real address shows your customers a real, live person took the time to write them an email, which makes them feel less like a business lead and more like they have an actual relationship with you.

Besides, by using your real email, you can encourage people to get back to you with any questions or even just to make a comment or suggestion. This promotes further engagement, which, if you hadn’t noticed yet, is crucial to your bottom line.

Track Your Emails

Ever noticed how some websites shoot you an email with some offer as soon as you search for a particular product?

Or how some businesses will send you multiple emails a week, repeatedly ramming a promotion down your throat?

Personally, nothing makes me reach for the unsubscribe button faster than stalkerish or insistent behaviour. And I’m quite sure I’m not the only one to feel this way. It’s invasive, off-putting and it simply doesn’t work.

Do yourself a favour, and don’t be that business. Set aside some time each week to track your emails and analyse your data. This will avoid over-emailing, the bane of so many people’s existence.

As a bonus, you’ll also get all sorts of useful information to help you optimise your campaign and get better results. Sounds like a no brainer, right?

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