The quest to deliver targeted, personalized e-mail is not a new one for marketers. Companies have employed various methods—list segmentation, subject-line testing, text personalization—to try to make e-mail valuable for customers and effective in boosting conversions. None of these standalone methods, however, truly personalize e-mail campaigns in a way that enables businesses to answer questions about the relationship between specific content and results.
Companies that rely only on list segmentation and optimized delivery schedules to tailor their messages are unlikely to understand what content to show individual recipients in order to maximize revenue or conversion rates. Dynamic content personalization, however, improves the performance of e-mail marketing campaigns by optimizing the visual elements displayed to each recipient. Senders can dynamically change images within the e-mail in real time based on explicit delivery rules. As a marketer you can choose to simply split-test visual elements or to automatically personalize the content for each user at the moment that he or she opens the e-mail.
Anyone who has quickly scanned an e-mail to determine whether it is worthy of further attention understands the importance of visual components in electronic communications. Understanding which images resonate with recipients is critical to the success of an e-mail marketing campaign, and A/B testing is an effective way to ensure these elements are optimized. Like Website A/B testing, A/B testing within e-mail is a straightforward way to understand how an audience is influenced by specific pieces of content.
Dynamic personalization enables you to set specific traffic percentages for each creative alternative or to automatically allocate higher percentages of traffic based on the key performance indicators of the campaign, such as conversion rate or revenue per visitor, rather than manage multiple splits for a campaign. Essentially, “automatic” A/B testing will remove poorly converting variations so that when the next user opens the e-mail, a higher-performing variation will be delivered.
Predictive algorithms can determine the content with which a user will most likely interact. Such algorithms allow personalization solutions to quickly “learn” how to maximize the effectiveness of your e-mail campaign. This set-it-and-forget-it approach to behavioral targeting provides automation and ongoing improvement in a flexible, marketer-controlled environment. Using behavioral targeting on visual elements within e-mail essentially allows you to personalize content on the fly and serve the right visual element to each user as he or she opens the e-mail.
Pairing the relevant content of an e-mail with the corresponding messages on your landing page or site is a full-spectrum approach toward user experience optimization. Personalizing site content with targeted A/B tests or automatically delivered behaviorally targeted messages will yield improvements in user experience, engagement conversion rates, and revenue.
With e-mail marketing, split-second first impressions make the difference between a recipient’s deciding to click through to a Website or to send a message to the spam folder. You can solidify the value of your e-mail communications by testing, optimizing, and adjusting your campaigns, just as you would do with site landing pages or any other valuable marketing vehicle. The decision to bridge the gap between a business and its prospects is an easy one. When the tools that enable an engaging and consistent user experience are so accessible today, there’s little reason to waste resources on anything less than personalized, optimized e-mail marketing.
Pete Olson is vice president of product management for Amadesa, a provider of Website optimization solutions.
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