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4 Techniques of Personalizing Your Email Marketing Campaign Personalize your email campaigns in a way that all the needs of targeted recipients are addressed.

By Katie Embry

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Whenever you receive an email, what makes you open it? The open rate of an email depends on how an email subject line looks, what the subject line denotes, the recipient's needs at that time and the time the email is sent. Business emails pull in high traffic as they are customer oriented.

The Radicati Group, in its email marketing study, had accounted that in 2013 every day more than 100 bn emails were sent and received. It is estimated that 2017 will account for above 132 bn emails to be sent and received on a daily basis.

The b2b network is vast and there is no end, with business emails taking a lead to make businesses approach other businesses easily, but there remains a 50-50 possibility of such emails to be opened by their recipients.

For a business to grow cross-industry approach must be planned and email is the most cost and time-effective way of reaching organizations from different industries. But, perhaps, almost every professional you are targeting at present may have an overflowing inbox. So, how can you get your emails their deserved attention? To make your b2b email marketing campaigns a success, a few simple methods need to be followed for adding a personal touch to the content of your email:

Names to Use for Greetings

It makes simpler for a marketer to attain open rate on an email if someone reads a message or an email with the subject line mentioning his or her first name. This kind of approach makes the reader feel more comfortable to open the email as psychologically the first name mention invokes trust and raises the interest of the recipient in reading through the entire email. This fact was proven by HubSpot in its 2014 study which reported that personalizing an email with its first name may increase click-through-rate from about 5.8% to about 7%.

Use Real Name in Email Address

As per HubSpot's 2014 report, most emails that were sent from email addresses with full names of the sender achieved about 7% higher open rate than the ones sent from addresses with just the first name of the sender. Using an email address with a full name of a marketing head along with the brand name is better as compared to a generic one coupled with a brand name, such as reply-to@marksandmarks.com.

The email address with the sender's full name makes the recipient more responsive to an email as it sets a person-to-person conversation base rather than company-to-person interaction. It makes the recipient feel more valued, and most who have any query regarding the concerned marketer's product or service, they will feel the urge to reach out if they know that they are interacting with an actual individual.

Segment your b2b contact list

The number of contacts in a contact list depends on the marketer's requirement, but categorizing b2b database is required to stay updated with the new market trends that keep emerging. So, suppose you have to target junior executives and senior executives at the same time, you can segment the database as per their designation in office. Similarly, there are other customer demographics that can be followed in order to divide a database so that niche audiences can be targeted.

You may have other criteria for segmenting your contact list too, like if your customer is months old or years old, then you can categorize your database accordingly. What works for another organization, may or may not work for you. In order to get closer to your clients, you need to know how to personalize your email campaign content according to the list category, which may be divided as per gender, age, location, and profession.

In most emails, you may need to provide complete information about the pricing model of a product or service you are promoting. Match the content as per your email recipient's interest and expect quick responses for better results.

Appropriate tone in the Emails

B2c companies use a conversational or a colloquial tone in their emails. Whereas, b2b organizations focus more on promotional pitches or "let's get down to business" tone. Once Jayson DeMers wrote for Forbes, "Impersonal content is boring". Your content though meant for a business purpose should not read robotic, because that may mean that the reader, who is a human being, may find that too superficial.

Though high-ranking executives want to read precise and to-the-point information, they would like the content to be persuasive and easy. After all, we are all human beings and every business professionals want to feel cared by a business firm when interacted with.

Essentially, using a personal tone to your b2b email marketing campaign can make it look more than a campaign and more like a conversation that triggers future communication. Addressing your target audience through your organization using your personal touch in your email campaigns will make it highly effective and will get you more referral traffic in future.

So, personalize your email campaigns in a way that all the needs of targeted recipients are addressed without much effort and the results yielded also become advantageous to your firm.

Katie Embry

Content writer, Email Data Group

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