Why It's More Important Than Ever to Personalize Emails

It was my birthday a few weeks back, and I was very ready to treat myself after a long, difficult year. So, the night before, I started scrolling through my inbox to see what birthday promotions I’d gotten—only to discover that there wasn’t a single one in sight! The next day, I spent so much time sifting through irrelevant batch and blast promotional emails trying to find birthday deals that I eventually gave up. And while I still managed to have a fun day, the experience left me feeling disappointed with most of the brands I usually buy from.

This kind of situation is a real issue for customers who, like me, put a big emphasis on brand loyalty. I do my homework before I buy, and if I’m purchasing something from your brand, I’m probably going to purchase again. But by the same token, I expect to be rewarded now and again with a discount or promotion for being a loyal customer (I mean, who doesn’t love a good deal?), not buried in irrelevant outreach.

It’s not just me. Time and time again, consumers sign up to receive marketing messages from the brands they patronize, then find themselves overwhelmed by generic emails that aren’t relevant to them or their interests. And people are increasingly fed up—in fact, nearly 90% of today’s consumers are annoyed by irrelevant marketing messages. As a former marketer myself, I definitely empathize with these brands to a certain degree. These generic emails are easy to set up and can generate immediate revenue for their business. However, consistently sending batch and blast emails to all of your customers can—and usually does—get very annoying.

With customer acquisition costs rising, holding onto current customers by providing relevant, personalized brand experiences is one of the most important things a marketer can do. But because consumers today have so many different options when it comes to where they spend their money, it’s critical for brands to build 1:1 relationships with their customers in order to keep up with the competition.

So what can you do to retain your customers and provide a better customer experience?

1. Listen to your customers. Ensure that you’ve worked with your development teams around tracking key stages of your user lifecycle, and providing milestones within your customer onboarding process to get to know your customers. What do they like? What are they engaging with most? What channels do they prefer to be messaged on?
2. Understand your customer insights. Great, you’re collecting all of this rich customer data. Use it! Take the time to build more targeted segments, personalized user journeys, or trigger messages when an action is completed. This will help you craft your messages to the right customers at the right time in their customer journey.
3. Personalize and engage with your customers on more than one channel. There are so many more digital touchpoints now to engage your customers. Once you understand which channels that they want to be engaged on, ensure that you’re reaching them on the channels that speak to them—and that the content you’re delivering in those channels is relevant to them, using the data that you’re capturing.

Final Thoughts

Making a point of personalizing your messages and delivering them in the channels that resonate with recipients pays off. In fact, Braze research has found that users who receive cross-channel campaigns see a 94% higher customer lifetime value. To learn more about the impact of cross-channel customer engagement, check out the Braze Global Customer Engagement Review.