How to Boost Clicks & Conversions with Email Personalization: 3 Actionable Tips

May 17, 2021

Remember the Wizard of Oz? The scene where Dorothy walks through her drab, lifeless house, then opens the front door to a colorful, magical, exciting new world? 
 
With a few simple adjustments, you can take your emails from dull and generic to exciting and compelling — and generate greater engagement rates and a stronger ROI.

It starts with personalization. 
 
80% of companies report seeing an uplift since implementing personalization (eConsultancy)
 
Personalization is more than just adding the subscriber’s first name to the greeting of your email. When we talk personalization, we’re talking about sending a personalized, super-relevant message within the body of the email that serves your contact the information they want within the context of their journey.  
 
To inject more life into your email campaigns, and in turn increase subscriber clicks and conversions, start here:

1. Leverage all email subscriber data

You have subscriber email addresses, but what other data points are available? Subscriber birthdate, location, anniversary date, purchase history, website activity, email opens, and email clicks can all be leveraged to send tailored content to subscribers that will bring about better results.  
 
For instance, say you have your subscriber’s birthdate. You could send happy birthday wishes and include a special offer as a gift for a highly-relevant, personalized message. 

Critical Impact Software Happy Birthday Email Ecard
Send a happy birthday email on your subscriber’s birthday

2. Segment by subscriber behavior

Beyond data points, a great way to steer your email marketing to more meaningful and impactful messaging is by segmenting subscriber behavior.  
 
With advanced list segmentation in Critical Impact, lists can be built dynamically by the Critical Impact system based on rules you set, such as: “Any subscriber that has opened or clicked any message in the past 30 days, put them in X list.”  
 
You can also harness website tracking data for each of your email subscribers who visit your website through Critical Impact’s Google Analytics integration. By setting up a few simple rules, you can have the Critical Impact system segment subscribers by: 

  • Time spent on site 
  • Pages viewed 
  • Goal completions 

These segments can then be used to drive your email campaigns, where you can send hyper-targeted email content that is most relevant to each segment. Doing so will lead to stronger engagement levels, and, in turn, more conversions and more sales.

3. Add dynamic content to your email messaging

A quick and effective way to energize your click rates is by employing dynamic content. With dynamic content, you are providing specific, relevant content within your email that’s more likely to resonate with the audience.   
 
Within Critical Impact, this would be done by inserting a “dynamic content rule” into your email template. Then, each subscriber who matches that rule will see their personalized content. Setting up dynamic content rules allow you to send highly-relevant content to multiple segments without having to send multiple emails.  
 
For instance, perhaps you want to show content based on location. You could show Virginia residents news in Virginia and New York residents news in New York through one email send with dynamic content rules.

Critical Impact Software Dynamic Content
Simply create a rule in your email template to send personalized content to subscribers

We’re not in Kansas anymore

One-size-fits-all email messaging is a thing of the past. Personalization makes it so that your messaging is one-to-one, more human, more like a conversation — which is more engaging and highly effective.  
 
If you haven’t yet leveraged the power of list segmentation and dynamic content in Critical Impact, be sure you do. By setting up a few simple rules, you’ll deliver a better experience for your subscribers and better results for your organization.