Ultimate Guide For Personalizing Email Content Based on Membership Status
Email marketing today is an integral part of any online business promotion strategy. According to a study by Smart Insights, Kath Pay and GetResponse, email marketing has the highest ROI compared to other marketing tools. According to Statista, 4 billion people were using email daily in 2020. By 2025, that number is expected to grow to 4.6 billion.
No one has doubted the effectiveness of email newsletters for a long time. If you combine email marketing with analytics software and personalization, you get an incredibly impactful tool that will bring you several times more money. This article will help you create your first personalized email based on membership status.
Why is personalization helpful?
Personalization, or building a unique user experience, is one of the significant trends of recent years. Our tastes are individual, and each of us is more likely to respond to being addressed by name than to a formal "Dear User!" And our preferences are not random. They can be explained scientifically.
Dennis P. Carmody and Michael Lewis conducted a “Brain Activation When Hearing One’s Own and Others’ Names” study. A unique brain reaction occurs when people hear their name (the areas responsible for long-term memory are activated). As a result, people perceive information as highly meaningful and remember it better. A similar reaction occurs in the brain when people receive personalized email content. They remember it much better, too.
In addition, personalization saves time and spares customers' nerves: they get the information they need quickly, without the annoyance of an intrusive sale. As a result, personalized communication is mutually beneficial: the company interacts more effectively with the potential client, and the client receives email content that meets his needs.
For example, the algorithms used by Amazon carefully analyze user behavior: what the user has already looked at, bought, what review or rating he gave, and many other actions of the potential customer, anticipating his next purchase and personalizing offers. As a result, Amazon's efforts are converting to success: 35% of sales come from personalized recommendations, and 56% of customers turn into repeat customers.
Netflix conducts about 250 A/B tests a year and collects information on more than 300 million users worldwide, compiling their profiles. Netflix tailors content based on customer preferences. Recommendations are based on an analysis of the user's previous choices and a comparison of their requests with the preferences of a group of people with similar interests. The system builds an offer starting with the most popular movies in that group of users, matching their descriptions (over 200 tags for each film) with the customer's unique preferences. To keep people's attention, Netflix personalizes the offer and the video covers, highlighting actors and actresses the customer knows, making each user's home page unique.
Personalized emails have the same success. Adobe conducted a survey in which respondents noted the following benefits of personalization:
- Increases customer loyalty - 53%
- Increases revenue - 49%
- Increases customer retention rate - 43%
- Reduces the cost of customer engagement - 27%
- Improves conversion rates - 25%
According to a Campaignmonitor study, the personalization of newsletters increases the open rate by 26%. So let`s discuss how to personalize email content based on membership status.
Types of personalized emails
There 2 types of personalized emails: manual and trigger. Let`s discuss them.
Manual personalized emails
This type of personalized email can't be linked to user actions on a website. These are personalized emails about promotions, new products, and other events.
Triggered personalized emails
Trigger personalized email is a type of email that is sent after a user performs a particular action on a website. You set up sending emails once and then only collect and analyze information on them. Trigger personalized emails are divided into:
- Welcome emails. You introduce your company/service to new users and motivate them to use your product. A membership invitation email should be informative, precise, and prompt them to action.
- Informational/content emails. These trigger emails are sent to change the member status of the user. They don't aim to sell right away: they aim to bring the user back or explain product features.
- Activation emails. Once the user has started to show interest in your product or service, send them an email or chain of emails describing features and functions: how to use, what to pay attention to, and what are the advantages over competitors.
- Reactivation emails. Helpful if the user came to the website, was interested in the product or service, and left. It is impossible to return many users with manual email campaigns, but with a trigger one - easy.
- Promo emails. Any email newsletter is aimed at membership sales. With it, you can remind them of current offers after their first purchase. The timing of sending depends on the specifics of your business and the features of the product.
Don't try to put everything into one newsletter email: helpful content, products, and announcements of new promotions.
How to create a personalized email based on membership status?
Before you put together a personalized email based on membership status, take a few steps to make your email marketing more effective.
Set a goal for a personalized email
Write down the result you want to get from sending personalized emails based on membership status in numbers. For example:
- Increase conversion to purchase by 3% within non-members.
- Increase revenue from the personalized email newsletter by 5% over the previous month.
- Attract 10% more traffic among non-members than during the last month.
It's important to decide why you're doing a personalized email newsletter and how you'll measure the results. Choose a metric, or better yet, draw a dashboard. It is impossible to see how much revenue has increased in most mailing services.
Determine the target audience
You will need a portrait of your customer during the strategy phase and when writing the content for your personalized email. Imagine your subscriber. Think about what they are interested in seeing in their inbox. To do this, you need to:
- Gather data on your customer's gender, age, interests, geography, and income level.
- Find out their fears, pains, needs, and pre-purchase selection criteria.
- Understand the customer's journey from need to purchase.
This knowledge will help you create an effective personalized email based on membership status.
Analyze your competitors
Once you understand who your customer is, you need to understand what other companies offer them. Sign up for competitors' email newsletters and social networks, research their website, and sign up for a free subscription or trial. Pay attention to:
- What competitors offer to customers
- What are the accents in the content of emails
- How competitors create a subject line and headlines in the emails
- How competitors formulate CTA for different membership statuses
- On what triggers and with what timeouts do competitors send emails
- How do competitors move the members and non-members through the sales funnel
- How often the emails are sent
With this analysis, you can get ideas and identify mistakes that you'll incorporate into your personalized emails.
Plan the content based on membership status
In this step, you have everything you need to think about the content of your email newsletter based on the specifics of your business and the information you gather.
Decide:
- What language you will write in based on membership status
- What kind of offers will attract members and non-members
- What you are going to emphasize in your texts for members and non-members
Planned content will contribute to the correct personalized email campaign impact. But don`t forget to check your texts for easiness and grammatical errors. For this, you can always reach out to the help of high-authority essay services.
We advise you to perform all the above steps before starting the mailing. It will help you to achieve the planned results and analyze the indicators.
Examples of personalized emails based on membership status
To be more aware of what to include in emails, we recommend reading our article about membership marketing. Below are several examples of personalized emails based on membership status.
Send members personalized emails with VIP services offer
When people sign up for a membership, they give you their information, time, and money for a unique experience. Free shipping, an exclusive local guide in the newsletter, or a monthly coaching call, create a memorable experience that gets people to sign up, keeps them coming back, and shares your product. One way for a product-based company to provide a VIP experience for its customers is to give subscribers early access to limited edition products.
Target is releasing exclusive toys and other merchandise, such as the red metal Mando, giving RedCard holders early access to previews and purchase exclusives first. Sending personalized emails for members on exclusive merchandise, previews for members, and early access opportunities create urgency for loyal shoppers who love the brand.
Send non-members personalized emails with advantages they’re missing
Show non-members the value of your products. Keep non-members in the loop by updating membership information on the FAQ page on your website or answering questions in a personalized email for non-members. Include descriptive visuals, such as charts and photos of people using your product.
Grammarly shows the updated version of its product in action (and suggests how to correct a sentence written in the passive voice). This personalized email for non-members leads the reader's eye from the barely noticeable 50% discount in the upper right corner to the product, then to the giant discount sticker, and finally to the main Call-to-Action button. It prompts non-members to upgrade Grammarly app. It is an excellent example of personalized email for non-members.
Send non-members personalized emails with recommendations or helpful articles
It is a service that teaches people how to meditate. Their personalized emails for non-members introduce them to different platform sections and offer thematic classes. For example, this personalized email for non-members advises meditations that help people fall asleep.
Headspace is a great place to learn identic from. The same colors, fonts, and characters are used in personalized emails, apps, and websites. Thanks to this, all Headspace channels are perceived as a whole. It's easy to see who sent the email by its design.
Send members personalized emails with information about service updates
It is a platform for designers to collect valuable tools, templates, icons, and other builds to work with the design.
The InVision personalized emails are helpful for members and anyone who works with visual content. Most of the tools and templates sent in the emails are free, and the blog articles are fun to read.
Common mistakes of personalized emails based on membership status
Every email marketer makes mistakes when creating personalized emails based on membership status for the first time. Here are 3 of the most common them.
Sending personalized emails to the wrong status
Status is an integral part of the personalized email campaign based on membership status. Your customers and subscribers have different interests, and they prefer only relevant and targeted content. An email relevant to non-members may not be as helpful to members. Consequently, this is why you need to double-check the statuses you are targeting in a particular email you are sending out.
Irrelevant product recommendations
Purchase recommendations in personalized emails are a good tool for re-engaging users and driving up sales, especially for eCommerce businesses. Marketers often research customer purchase history and craft relevant emails based on that data. But sometimes, data mining is flawed. Monitor your customers' most frequent searches on your store's website and send them relevant product recommendations. Also, read our article on how to create ideal membership welcome package.
Incorrect sending times
No matter how well you made the email, if it's not sent at the right time, there's a big chance that it will remain unopened or go straight into the user's trash. And all this just because it didn't come at the right time. To make sure your emails get opened and read, make sure you send them at the right time when users are most likely to open them. Try to avoid mass mailings at different times; instead, optimize the timing of your emails for each membership status.
Conclusion
So, key takeaways:
- Personalized emails contain content specific to particular membership statuses.
- Users are more loyal to such personalized emails and are less likely to send them to spam.
- Personalized emails help get members back, increase their interest in your emails and your product, and increase sales.
- To personalize emails based on membership status, the first thing to do is understand what data you need and how to get it.
The more you send personalized emails based on membership, the more likely your targeted audience will want to upgrade or become a member in the future.
