Email marketing is an effective way to increase lead conversion and return on investment in all online marketing methods. But when you send generic bulk emails to prospects, it often doesn’t produce the necessary result. However, businesses can stand out by crafting messages that appear to be manually researched and tailored.

Sending personalised emails increases the chances of capturing the attention of prospects and driving conversions. However, the dilemma most businesses encounter is how to balance sending bulk emails with personalization for optimal results. So, in this article, we will share some tips businesses can employ to personalise their bulk email marketing to boost engagement and get more sales.

Strategies for Optimising Bulk Email Marketing With Personalization

Utilising bulk email marketing is one of the best ways to boost engagement. It also helps to build trust, boost engagements, and improve customer retention. Below are some strategies customers can use to optimise bulk email marketing with personalization.

  • Gather quality leads

The first step to developing a personalised email marketing campaign is to collect relevant leads. Your leads should be individuals or businesses that have an interest in your products or services. And for your personalization campaign to be effective, you need to collect as much data about the prospects as possible.

There are plenty of ways to collect data from your prospects. For example, you can collect prospects’ data by requesting they fill out email forms, using dedicated tools to scrape information about your prospects from social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, or even tracking website behaviour.

  • Segment your audience

After collecting as many leads as you can, it is important to divide your client base into different groups. Rather than blasting your prospect list with generic emails, segmentation will help you target more personalised content that will resonate with each group, which will result in higher engagement. There are so many ways to segment your audience, but most people go with demographics, psychographic behaviours, purchase history, engagement level, and so on.

  • Employ hyper-personalization

Segmenting your prospect list into smaller groups is often not enough, as you still need to hyper-personalise your email. You can achieve hyper-personalization by creating a mail merge. Mail merge makes use of tags, which help you incorporate personalised content into your email.

For example, you can add a placeholder that mentions the reader’s name. To go a step further, you can personalise your mail merge with other interactions the readers have with your brand, such as their last purchase, and suggest items related to their specific interests.

  • Utilise personalised subject lines

Subject links are another way to capture the attention of your readers when sending bulk emails. Ensure that the subject lines you use are catchy and incorporate some personalised techniques such as location-specific keywords, discounts, offerings, and so on.

Using personalised subject lines can improve your open rate by over 50%, making them crucial in any email marketing campaign. Also, the length of your subject line can impact its success. So, while you want the subject line to be as descriptive and detailed as possible, ensure you keep it concise.

  • Factor in the subscribe stage in the sales funnel

Also, when personalising the email you send out to your prospects, it is important to consider where they are in your sales funnel. There are six crucial stages in a typical sales funnel: awareness, discovery, evaluation, intent, purchase, and loyalty.

Identifying which point a customer is on the sales funnel allows you to engage them with the right message. Also, offer customer discounts on your products or services to capture their attention.

  • Pick the right time to send the email

Timing is an important factor to consider when sending bulk emails. However, it is not easy to ascertain the time to send an email as people have different habits. Nevertheless, some people are early birds, while others prefer checking their emails at the end of the day.

If your prospect list is made up of executives and entrepreneurs, they read their emails more frequently. As such, it does not matter what time you send the emails. The time zone of your prospects also matters when sending emails. Sending your emails at the right time is important because it determines if your email gets read or not.

  • Use personalised product recommendations

Prospects appreciate it when email contents are personalised to their preferences. As such, personalising the content with product recommendations based on their previous behaviour and personal data is an effective way to convert prospects.

For example, if a customer previously bought a product from you, you can recommend complementing products at a discount to capture their attention. Also, customer data such as their gender and age can come in handy in sending personalised recommendations.

  • Try A/B testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is another strategy you can use to personalise content for your prospects. After segmenting your prospects, send them different types of personalised emails, then monitor how each group responds to the email.

Based on your analysis, you can better gear your email content to match the needs of your content. For example, you can try mentioning the names of subscribers in the subject line and compare it to performance without their names in the subject line.

  • Utilise behaviour triggers

The data you can collect from your subscribers can be instrumental in triggering responses from email marketing campaigns. Essentially, trigger emails are a marketing strategy that is based on the behaviour of certain customers.

For example, if a subscriber views a particular category of products, you can personalise the email you send to such customers, recommending the best deals in that category. But to effectively implement this strategy, you need to track website and application activities.

  • Track your emails and automate follow-ups

Finally, it is important that you track the performance of the emails you send. You should measure the impact of the emails you are sending, as it helps you gather additional data to refine your strategy.

Aside from tracking, also automate your follow-ups. For example, after sending an email, have follow-up responses if the customer does not reply, or if the customer replies, if the customer does not open the mail, and when the customer opens the mail, and so on.