Email Insider - Making it Personal
From Email Insider: http://blogs.mediapost.com/email_insider/?p=613#comments
Here are four ways to personalize your email program today:
1) Include the recipient’s name somewhere in the message. This is one of the simplest but most powerful personalization tactics. As Dale Carnegie famously said, “A person’s name is to that person the most beautiful sound in any language.” Just be careful how and where you use a name: it often works well as a salutation in letterform messages, but can seem gimmicky when used gratuitously.
2) Add a user control panel to your emails. Dedicate a portion of your email to the recipient: add a user control panel or personal profile section. This is a piece of real estate the recipient “owns,” featuring a combination of user data and the opportunity to update that data - the ability for users to control their email experience. This could be as simple as “Hello, John Doe,” preceding links to a preference center with controls on email format and frequency. (We jokingly call this a “faux-file.”)
A more developed user profile section might include account or loyalty program information, recent activity details, and a subscriber photo. In one test, adding a personal photo to an email control panel inspired a flurry of recipient activity; there was a massive uptick in profile photo updates every time an email launched. Whether it’s pictures or preferences, even adding a faux-file can help you build out real user profile data by offering obvious blanks to be filled.
3) Personalize content based on a user’s preference center selections. Give recipients the ability to specify how much and what type of information they want. This is a great approach for content publishers. It’s simple: ask them what they want, and then deliver that! If they want to hear about Olympic diving, send them an article about that famous triple-flip.
If you give your subscribers the opportunity to tailor content to their interests and leave out information that doesn’t appeal to them, I guarantee your retention rates will increase. For more in-depth tips on this tactic, fellow Insider columnist Melinda Krueger wrote an excellent article on preference center-based content publishing just yesterday!
4) Include specific product recommendations within a mass mail message. This is more of an advanced email-ecommerce fusion move, but if you are already capturing user behavior and/or purchase information on your Web site, it’s the next logical step.
Populate a submessage section of your mass mail with personalized recommendations based on recipients’ past purchase or browse behavior. Use default content for recipients you don’t have enough data to make recommendations to.