One of the most important benefits of having an email list is that it lets you develop a relationship with your subscribers. Even as your list grows to the thousands and beyond, there are still steps which you can take to keep things intimate and personal with your subscribers which I am going to call personalized email marketing.
Intimacy is hard to come by on the Internet, so anything which you can do to better connect with your subscriber can increase the conversion rate of your goals whether that’s to motivate your subscriber to purchase your offer or even just open and read your emails in the first place.
How to Do Personalized Email Marketing
One of these email marketing tips for getting personal is to segment your list so that you can send specific emails to specific subscribers on your list based on information which you can get from MailChimp, the best free email marketing software, such as their geographical location or the emails which they have opened in the past from you or the links within those emails which they have clicked on.
Segmenting is just one aspect of personalized email marketing; there is also a number of different tags which you can use to personalize each message which you send out. These tags pull information about that subscriber and put it right in that email for you. You can use these tags in the title/subject of the email or within the body. Let’s look at a few tags which you might use:
{!name_fix} – This puts your subscribers name wherever you include this tag in your message whether it’s a broadcast or a follow up message.
{!email} – This puts the subscriber’s email address wherever you include the tag.
{!geog_city} {!geog_region} – Geographic location.
You can also create custom tags to reflect any custom fields of additional information which you collected when your subscriber signed up. Great for local marketing.
{!signdate dayname}, {!signdate long} – The date they signed up.
{!date abb+0} – Today’s date.
{!date abb+7} – Future date. The number refers to today’s date plus however many days you specify. The “7” in this case represents a week from today. This is a neat tag to use in combination with limited time offers to get your subscriber thinking that their window of opportunity is closing, thus motivating them to take action with whatever offer you are promoting.
You can also use the date tag to notify your subscriber the exact day in which they’ll hear from you next. Pretty cool, indeed.
Keep in mind that just because you can use personalized email marketing, it doesn’t mean that you should go overboard and personalize every single aspect of every email you send out. Use it only when you believe that it truly enhances your message.
Remember that MailChimp is completely free. You get full access to their features, can create as many sign up forms for your site as you like using their many templates, and you can send as many autoresponder or broadcast messages as you like.
Check out my email marketing guide for more information or check out my Complete Email Marketing Blueprint for everything you need to know about email marketing.