Create a great personalized email
How do you do it well?
Hey there, it’s Jacob at Retention.Blog 👋
I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.
Every Tuesday I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.
Real personalization in emails is easy to talk about, but hard to do well
Everyone talks about personalization, but often it’s just basic segmentation.
Personalization is creating a unique message for each person
Segmentation is creating a few variations of a message targeted at a few different specific audience groups
One of the best personalized emails is Grammarly’s Insights email.
Grammarly has the benefit of having precise data on all your writing activity through the browser extension.
They focus on making you feel good about your writing progress and skills and show their product's value through their corrections.
What data are you capturing (or could be capturing) that you’re not using effectively right now?
When you’re active they motivate you, when you’re inactive they prompt you to start writing, login, or connect the browser extension.
They also do an amazing job of unique and engaging subject lines every week.
So why should you care?
It takes a lot of work to send a new newsletter every week.
What if you could build a newsletter once, and then have it sent every week and it was different every time? How much time would that free up for more strategic work?
This time-saving is in addition to an exciting and engaging email that will sound out against all the other crap in the inbox.
Why don’t more companies do this if they have the data?
It’s hard to prioritize the long-term over the short-term. This can be a multi-month project to build a great personalized automated email.
It doesn’t have to be as complex as Grammarly’s.
A Retention.Blog favorite, RISE, has semi-recently launched a new “Weekly Summary” email.
RISE is constantly thinking about how to add value to their messages. (See my newsletter on RISE’s push notifications and onboarding here.)
Provides an assessment of your sleep habits
Advises on when to complete activities throughout the day for peak energy
As awesome as this email is, they got caught by a classic issue of a missing “First Name” value. Don’t forget your default fallback values!
This info is a natural extension of the messages they send via push notifications.
Emails don’t have the same dynamic ability as normal websites, so coding these can be tricky.
RISE has pulled a few tricks by only having a few dynamic elements.
They, of course, change the date at the top
They update the End of Week Sleep Debt Graphic
There are a few image variations, so they can insert the image URL based on simple logic
And they update the text next to the Energy level chart
By only updating the text, they’re able to make it seem like a personalized image
It would be much more impressive if they generated a dynamic image each time. Tools like Movable Ink can do this, but they usually require a decent amount of backend data work to make it valuable. And it’s usually a bit pricey for smaller companies
How do you execute all of this well?
Identify the value of your product
Can you either extend this value in an email or show progress towards their goals?
If you have a meditation app, it will be tough to put audio lessons into an email, but you can educate them on meditation progress, what they’ve learned, total time meditating, etc.
Make sure it makes sense for your product
Don’t try to build this just because it’s cool. Have a specific goal and make sure it’s actually adding value to the user experience.
Do you have the data infrastructure?
You can build this through a fully transactional setup managed by sending API calls to a tool like Sendgrid.
Your development team could build the email template, insert personalization variables, and then pass the data for those variables in the API call to trigger the email sending.
Some teams use other templating engines to generate all the email HTML and manage it all through internal code
Or you can send the data to a marketing automation tool and build the campaign there
This can be better if you have a good email platform with a decent amount of user data feeding in. It avoids having to maintain more code to power the email.
Sometimes you have less flexibility due to the constraints of the tool, but this can be preferred because it puts the power in the marketer’s hands to build and frees up development resources
Create the content
You’ll need to map out possible combinations to ensure all the content fits together.
Grammarly’s email is complex, but it didn’t start this way. They added more complexity over time. (Check the bottom of this email to see what it looked like from 2016)
Build something that you would find valuable. It’s easy to create one of these emails that gets repetitive over time and people stop finding it interesting.
At a minimum, take notes from Grammarly and write a bunch of unique, engaging subject lines.
Deploy and measure!
To measure the impact, use a control group for several weeks to months to understand better.
Measuring the impact of one message won’t be enough, as ideally, the impact compounds over time.
Start with targeting active users because they’ll be receiving the most value.
If users aren’t active, it’s unlikely the email will look good since there is no data or new info to populate
After you find success with an active user audience, see if you can add variables or components that change when they become inactive to re-engage them.
The more you can automate your CRM strategies, the more time you’ll have to work on strategic work that makes a larger impact.
Investing time in automation is almost always worth it so you can escape the manual work death spiral of one-off blasts.
FYI Grammarly’s Insights email started much less complex. Here is what it looked like in 2016. (And it had the same subject line every time, “Your Weekly Progress Report & Tips”)
📣 Want to help support and spread the word?
Go to my LinkedIn here and like, comment, or share my post.
OR
Share this newsletter by clicking here.
Once again, I’m finding your newsletter more valuable than most of the articles out there.