Personalization is still a work in progress for many organizations. Widely desired for its outcomes, personalization can exponentially increase open and click rates, reduce unsubscribes, generate responses, boost the ROI of email campaigns, and help realize end goals. However, the rewards are reserved for those who can pull it off effectively.
As John Bonini of email marketing firm Litmus has explained, “Personalization is about so much more than a [first_name]. It’s about understanding what drives a person’s decision-making process, where they are in that process, and placing all of it within the context of their specific challenges. In other words, email personalization is hard work. It’s not an add-on, but rather requires an obsessive understanding of each segment of your audience.”
There is a lot of information available about personalization for emails and marketing in general, but not all of it is relevant to lead generation for agency new business. With that specific use case in mind, I’m going to share how we incorporate personalization at The Duval Partnership, along with some tips for your own personalization efforts.
The first way we personalize our lead generation emails is by list segmentation based on criteria such as industry, location, size, and role or title. This leaves us with smaller groups of targets that we can write very specific email messages to.
When creating our emails, we first ask, “What is the story we are telling prospects about what this agency does — and why should they care?” We typically create a series of emails for each target group. These emails work together and as standalones because the recipient may or may not read all of them. Within an email series, we want to be consistent with the message, but not redundant, so we might emphasize different aspects of the agency’s value and experience in each email.
Every email in a series is written specifically to the target’s industry and role, emphasizing relevance, how their challenges can be solved, and what evidence we have to back it up. Depending on who the emails are going to, we may use a different tone, email format or length, and link to different assets.
Next, we incorporate personalization tokens that automatically populate our emails with contact-specific details such as first name, last name, and company name. There was a time when these personalized tokens alone were enough to get a response, but everyone now knows that there’s nothing very personal about auto-inserting these fields into an email, so much of the impact is lost. Research still shows an engagement boost from using personalization tokens in your email body and subject line, so don’t stop using them, but know that they alone aren’t enough. You have to go further to authentically tailor the email to the recipient if you want it to feel personalized.
We often take the email templates we’ve created specifically for a target vertical and persona and go beyond the personalization tokens to customize it for the recipient. For example, we may incorporate a recent event at the target company, a significant new campaign, or key hire.
Our objectives in crafting emails are to get the recipient to:
As soon as we get a response to an email, we remove the contact from the lead generation email sequence and keep all go-forward communications with them customized. For these customized emails, we might pull text and asset links from the email campaign as appropriate, but they are always going to be tailored to the specific contact based on conversations and information about their needs.
Targeted, personalized, relevant emails that offer value to the recipient are highly effective for lead generation purposes. Crafting them is more challenging than it looks; there is quite a bit of background research that goes into each email series to connect the dots between the agency and the target’s needs. And data requires careful attention before it can be put to use. But the benefits of email personalization are within reach for anyone who is willing to do the work.
Image credits: Personalization for Agency New Business Lead Gen Emails © Adobe Stock/Patrick Daxenbichler