The following is a guest post by Kevin Geroge. Kevin, the Head of Marketing at EmailMonks – one of the fastest growing Email design and coding companies, specializes in crafting beautiful email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and breathes ‘email marketing’. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing tips at his blog.
It is an era of personalization. Emails that are the one-size-fits-all kind do not work anymore. To make a mark with your email marketing activities, you need to make sure that the emails you send address the needs and interests of your subscribers and are relevant to them. 
An email that resonates with your subscribers and speaks of their needs is more likely to get a response than an email with a generic offer.
With brands figuring out ways to engage more and more prospects with their emails, using personalization has become one of the most popular tactics. According to a study by Evergage, 77% of customers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.
Let us have a look at some popular brands that have nailed email personalization and lessons to implement personalization in our own business.
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Lyft: Insights into User’s Activities
Lyft is one of the most innovative ride-sharing brands and an elite in email marketing. The brand keeps a track of real-time user data and sends the users insights of how they have engaged with them. This, in turn, increases brand engagement. Apart from sending a customized report, the brand has included rewards, badges and fun facts in the email to encourage the subscribers to stay on board.
This is a great tactic to keep your subscribers engaged with your brand’s emails. Send them timely rewards and discounts and show them a summary of their past purchases and activities. This can be done for all types of businesses and online stores.
Image Source: Really Good Emails
Amazon: Recommendations and Customer Feedback
Amazon has mastered the art of hyper-personalizing the customers’ shopping experience. The brand focuses on understanding their customers’ interests, needs, and challenges, to create content for their emails. Apart from sending relevant product recommendations, the brand takes feedback from the customers on their recent purchases to enhance their services.
In this email, the customer is asked to review the product that they bought recently. This helps in building trust and making the customer relationship stronger. Amazon also sends cart abandonment emails and product recommendation emails that play a major role in keeping the customers constantly in touch with the brand’s offerings.
Image Source: Really Good Emails
Grammarly: Tracking User Data
Grammarly, the writing tool tracks real-time user data and sends a weekly email to their customers. Apart from weekly reports, it also sends a yearly roundup of the users’ 
activities to their customers. This will let the subscribers know about their activity on the tool, compare with the others using the tool and make necessary changes to improve.
This email shows the summary of the user’s activity, including their productivity and accuracy and encourages them to keep using the tool. A good practice is to segment your customers as per their activity on your tool/website and then send relevant reports and insights that would keep them glued to using your brand.
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Source: Really Good Emails
Airbnb: Using Dynamic Content
Airbnb focuses on sending personalized relevant data to its users. 
The brand’s emails provide personalized recommendations based on the users’ profile information such as their location, past activities, and behavior. Based on the data of their customers, they create dynamic content to include only relevant and useful data in their emails.
The above email is a summary roundup email that gives insights into the user’s past trips and activities. They have personalized the email by using dynamic content based on their cities. This helps in making the email highly relevant to the subscribers. The email also shows recommendations to plan their next trip, based on the insights collected.
Image Source: Litmus Scope
Jack Wills: Cart Abandonment Reminder
Jack Wills, the fashion brand uses personalization in their email marketing strategy. The brand believes in providing their customers with what they want and when they want it, thereby delivering a personalized customer experience to each subscriber.
Sending cart abandonment emails is a great tactic to re-engage your subscribers and entice them to purchase the products that they left halfway in the cart. This cart abandonment email from Jack Wills shows multiple product images with their details and price in the email itself, along with the order details. The email also has a section for related products that the customer might like, to improve engagement.
Source: Really Good Emails
Adidas: Automated Emails
Adidas is a pioneer brand in providing personalized experiences to its customers. From using dynamic content to sending product recommendations, the brand leverages personalization to a great extent in its email marketing campaigns. 
Automated emails that are personalized to the customer’s action will keep your subscribers interested in your emails.
This email from Adidas is one such automated email that includes the image of a recently searched product which was out of stock. The requested item is shown along with the size details and image, with a confirmation that the customer will be informed when the product is back in stock. Sending such emails when the product is out of stock will refrain the subscriber from buying the product from some other brand. E-commerce businesses can use this tactic to keep subscribers engaged with your brand instead of buying from competitors.
Source: Really Good Emails
In a nutshell, segment your email list to send the right email at the right time and make sure your email personalization strategy includes the following:
- Personalized subject lines that entice the users to open the emails
- Relevant product recommendations based on their interests and past purchases
- Real-time user activity reports and summary of past engagement
- Personalized images and content addressed to each individual customer
- Cart abandonment reminders to bring back the abandoners
- New product notifications, back in stock notifications or replenishment notifications
- VIP/Loyalty offers to entice subscribers to make purchases
- Dynamic content and images to make the emails highly relevant
- Re-engagement emails to encourage the inactive subscribers to engage with your brand’s emails
Wrapping Up
If you are new to email marketing, then incorporating personalization in your email campaigns would be a great way to build trust with your customers. Start out small by collecting the right data, segmenting it in the right manner and implementing it at the right time. The key to good email marketing is to understand, observe and invest in your prospects and customers.
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