[FAQ]

Hey email marketers,

I’m pretty comfortable using the subscriber’s first name in my email subject lines and greetings, but I feel like I need to take our personalization to the next level to really stand out in the inbox in 2025.

What are some effective strategies or techniques you’re using to make emails feel more personal and relevant to the individual subscriber? I’m thinking about things like using past purchase history, website Browse behavior, or maybe even their stated preferences. What kind of data is the most impactful to use for this?

Any ideas or examples would be fantastic. Thanks!

[Jeff Bullas]

Moving beyond just using a subscriber’s first name is where email marketing becomes truly effective. Deeper personalisation is about sending the right content to the right person at the right time, based on what you know about their interests and behaviour.

There are several powerful ways to achieve this. First, you can personalise based on demographic and geographic data. This can be as straightforward as sending location-specific event invitations or offers, or if you are in a business-to-business context, tailoring your messaging based on data points like company size or job role.

Second, using behavioural data from your website or application is incredibly effective. You can send highly targeted emails based on specific pages a subscriber has viewed, content they have downloaded, or products they have added to their cart but not purchased. These “abandoned cart” emails, for example, are often very successful because they are timely and directly relevant to an action the user just took.

Third, for any business that sells products, purchase history is a goldmine for personalisation. You can send intelligent recommendations for related products, offer a discount on a repeat purchase of a consumable item, or send helpful content on how to get the most out of a product they have already bought.

Fourth, you can leverage explicitly stated preferences. When people subscribe to your list, or in a subsequent preference centre email, you can directly ask them what topics they are interested in hearing about. This allows you to segment your audience based on their own choices and ensure you are only sending them emails they have indicated they want.

Fifth, email engagement data itself is a useful tool. You can create a segment of your most engaged subscribers to reward them with special offers or early access. Conversely, you can create an automated re-engagement campaign that triggers for subscribers who have not opened or clicked your emails in a while.

Sixth, you can implement dynamic content within your emails. This advanced technique allows you to show different content blocks within the same email template to different subscribers based on the data you have. For example, a retail email could display menswear to subscribers identified as male and womenswear to those identified as female, all within a single email campaign.

All of these advanced techniques rely on two foundational elements: first, ethically collecting relevant data about your subscribers, and second, using your email platform’s tools to segment your list into smaller, more targeted groups based on that data.

True personalisation is about using this data to make every email feel as relevant and timely as possible to the individual receiving it. This approach builds a stronger customer relationship and significantly improves your campaign results.

Cheers,

Jeff

[Author]

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