Over the past decade, we’ve seen an enormous growth in the overall usage of e-communication for, well, pretty much every industry possible. In fact, popular eblast management tool Mailchimp reports that they have over 8 million clients who collectively send billions of eblasts monthly – and they are just one of the many services out there. The question is – are your eblasts working for you? Here’s a great starting point: Mailchimp reports a benchmark for real estate of 22.11% as an open rate, and 2.22% as a click through rate. If you’re not achieving results as good as this, you’re likely off the mark and will want to rethink your strategy; however, if these numbers seem to be in your ballpark, you may be wondering how you can take your campaign to the next level. The answer may simply be to get more personal with your audience.
Personalization is more than just using a tag to add a name to an email, it’s about building a relationship with your audience, and delivering customized content that generates engagement, clicks and – best of all – more qualified leads. There are a few ways you can do this. One is to understand the current status of your recipient. Are they a new recipient? Are they a long time registrant? Using a great database management system will help you to properly organize your registrants and build customized content around that. Another option is to track their experience on your website, and then use that data to help build personalized profiles. Having registrants fill out a survey during their initial sign-up can also allow you to further segment your emails. Ideally, based on the information you collect, you’ll send emails that contain content and messaging that speaks to their interests, which is more likely to keep them engaged than a standard email that you send to your whole list.
While it can be a bit more work to develop the variations of your campaign’s messaging and content for different groups, it definitely pays off. A recent personalized campaign we ran, which had only 4 different personalized groups, had an open rate of over 70%. The proof is in the pudding, personalization reigns supreme.
JohnAmardeil.com 