Personalization Drives Email Marketing to New Heights

While the effectiveness of email marketing cannot be challenged – as it’s constantly voted the best marketing channel – personalization is also becoming an essential strategy that cannot be ignored. The folks at VentureBeat recently ran a really awesome study into the effects of personalization in email marketing. It surveyed as many as 200 email marketers and learned a lot about the direction of the highly effective email marketing tactic.

One of the most revealing findings in VentureBeat’s study was in regards to how personalization can affect open rates. About 95% of the marketers in the study shared that open rates improve when they personalize their emails. Furthermore, unsubscribe rates decrease when emails are personalized. Those two facts says enough about the effectiveness of personalization, but let’s venture onward into more of VentureBeat’s findings!

Here’s exactly how much personalization affected their email marketing efforts: 21.3% of the 200 marketers saw an open rate increase of 5-10%, and 20.8% of them saw a 15-20% increase. The third highest increase was in the 0-5% range, noticed by 17.8% of the marketers. While only 4.5% saw a total increase of 50-70+%, that’s a huge number, and it’s suggestive that it can only grow larger as personalization efforts improve over time. It’s also worth noting that 9.1% of marketers saw an increase in open rate of 20-30%, and 7.% saw an increase of 30-40%.

While addressing your recipients by name is only a small part of email personalization, it was found to be the most popular by marketers: 32% of marketers personalize by name, 29.4% do so by Social Profile, and demographics (age and gender) won third place at 27.4%. It’s worth noting that as automation services improve, it’s conceivable that other verticals like “previous interactions,” “call history,” and “web browsing history” could come to replace the top three. Check out the graphic below for more details :)

One of the more interesting findings by VentureBeat concerns how many segments marketers personalize email for. The highest percentage of segments was in the 2-5 range, which took 28%. 6-8 segments took second place at 20%, and 10-15 and 16-25 tied at 14% apiece. 100+ segments had only 3%, and individualized (segmented to an individual level) took 7%. See graphic below for more details.