Last Updated on 2 years by Francesca Egay
In 2017, the estimated number of email users was about 3.7 billion.
And, according to the research done by Statista, the number of email users will reach 4.3 billion by 2022.
Numbers don’t lie – email marketing remains the option to engage your customers.
Need more proof? Here are email marketing stats from 2018 related to email personalization:
- The average ROI email marketing has is of 3,800%. This means that the average return for every dollar invested is around $38.
- The third most influential source of information for B2B audiences behind colleague recommendations and industry thought leaders is email marketing.
- The non-segmented email marketing campaigns get 14.64 % lesser email opens and 59.99% smaller clicks than the segmented email marketing campaigns.
- The open email rate increases by 19% and the click-through rate increases by 50% if you include video in your email.
There is no doubt that marketers use email marketing as one of the critical strategies for acquiring and engaging their customers.
Now, if you’re doing email personalization as a freelancer, then you’re already reaping the benefits of repeat customers and high response rates!
In fact, the most awesome freelancers and writers use email personalization to accommodate customers with their projects.
So what’s the deal with email personalization, huh?
Why do freelancers and writers need email personalization?
Believe it or not, some freelancers don’t have an email marketing strategy in place.
Whatever the reason may be, that’s one hell of a missed opportunity!
Freelancers and writers do not have a dedicated marketing team.
In fact, they are their own marketing team! And that’s not a good thing…
That’s what makes email personalization value for them.
Because here’s the thing:
You really don’t need a marketing team to run an effective marketing strategy.
As long as you know how to personalize your email campaigns, you can generate clients left and right with relative ease!
To complement the stats above, below are reasons why freelancers and writers need personalized email marketing:
- By building relationships, you get to grow your customer loyalty and gain their trust.
- As freelancers and writers, this is the most efficient way to boost engagement with your customers
- The conversions will be drastically increased by the use of personalization in email campaigns.
- The email personalization also gives way to better customer retention. It eliminates the need to hunt for new clients all the time.
The process of email personalization
Segmenting your prospects
According to 50% marketing influencers, 37% of influencers found out that another effective strategy for email marketing is personalization through data segmentation.
Studies reveal that there is a bump seen by the 82% of marketers in their email open rates by the use of the email personalization.
Plus, a recent study conducted by a well-known marketing firm confirms that customer segmentation is the top priority for over 1,000 marketing, digital, and e-commerce professionals.
72% of these professionals reported the use of customer data for the creation of segments.
The study also indicates that segmentation is a priority even for underachieving businesses.
So what’s the point of all this mumbo-jumbo?
Email personalization is impossible without segmentation!
These stats suggest how personalization affect email campaigns in a good way.
No two customers are the same. Each one will have different needs, preferences, and interests.
And any single solution would not make your all customers happy.
The same goes for email personalization.
You can’t send the same email to all your list and expect the same results across the board.
You must send unique and personalized emails to each one!
And to do this the easy way, you must segment your subscribers.
By “segment,” you need to group your prospects according to their needs and wants.
For instance, you want to send emails to potential clients from different digital marketing practices – SEO, social media, content marketing, etc.
Each practice constitutes for a segment.
Your prospects from the SEO practice is a segment.
That’s why it’s safe to assume they have the same needs and wants because they work in the same industry.
Using a tool to segment your prospects, freelancers and writers can create different customer segments based on their demographics.
You can use these segments for sending tailor-made offers and also recommendations to your potential customers.
So why is there a need for segmenting your prospect?
The answer is painfully clear if you’re paying attention.
You’re in competition with other brands related to the interests of your prospects.
That said, you’re one of the many people vying for their attention.
Considering that online users are a fickle bunch, time is of the essence.
They can’t give their entire attention to what you have to say!
So here’s what you should do:
You need to make your content count!
Whether it’s a blog post or email, it should not waste the time of your prospects!
If not, then say goodbye to better sales!
That’s why you must cut through the noise.
Send them content based on their interests, wants, and needs!
59% of consumers who have experienced personalization believe that personalization impacted their buying decision.
The common characteristics of your customers help to improve the results that are the reason you need to segment them into different groups.
Segmented email campaigns can increase up to 760% boost in revenue. Also, there is an increase in open rates by 26% in these campaigns.
The personalization of email campaigns according to the interests of the customers shows your care towards your audiences.
You can do this by sending them offers and recommendations relevant to their needs.
For writers, you can offer them free content if they perform something for you. A common example is sharing your content on social media,
There are a lot of things which freelancers and writers can use in grouping their customers like the purchase history, locations, genders, ages or even job titles of their customers.
There is a lot more you can do with these segments.
You can go deeper and identify common denominators among your prospects in the segment. This should help you come up with more email personalization messages.
Creating dynamic content
One of the great ways to personalize emails for your customers is through the use of dynamic content.
Dynamic email marketing shows different content according to the behavior, preferences, and interests of the customers.
It takes place when the user or customers request for a page. It then refers to the websites as well as email content.
The use of dynamic content helps the freelancers and writers save time form customizing each email according to the segment.
Now, depending on the email automation tool you’re using, it will customize the messages according to the segment of your recipients.
This is a great way to increase engagement and conversions.
People respond better to email if its content resonates with their needs and wants!
You can change the email content according to gender, location, preferences, past purchases, weather, loyalty program status, and many valuable parameters.
Again, you can fill out these factors using your email platform of choice.
Come up with recommendations
Recommendations can go a long way in treating and valuing your customers adequately.
According to the studies, 76% of customers expect businesses in understanding their needs and preferences yet half of them don’t feel that way.
You can better understand the need of the customers by taking a look at past purchases which the customers have made and then offer them customized recommendations.
One way of doing this is by pitching information to your customers through offers on related or complementary products.
If you don’t have products, you can send how-to guides with information about your services.
For freelance writers, a guide on how to write compelling content is a great way to attract businesses who want to boost their online business with content.
By creating one, you can offer your services at the end of the guide so they don’t have to write the content.
This strategy shows that you understand the need of your customers and their actual requirements. It also helps in getting additional sales for your services as well.
The greatest thing about how-to guides is how it encourages subscribers to hire you for your services.
They will appreciate that you poured your heart by sharing insider information on how to create content.
If they love your guide, then they will hire you as their writer for sure!
Hand out exclusive offers
Discount coupons and codes are regular in the e-commerce industry.
In the freelancing industry? Not so much.
However, that shouldn’t discourage you from trying!
People often send discount coupons and offers to customers to their email list.
But why not we can send the special offers and discounts based on the segment to which the customer belongs?
Freelancers and writers would receive great benefits from this by pitching the customer based on these segments with dedicated special offers.
Customers when receiving the offers and discounts to which they are directly related or provide them with an offer.
For example, you can offer keyword research as part of your service if they hire you as their writer.
However, this offer is valid if they hire you within the next 24 hours!
With this offer, you achieve two things:
- Provide a targeted offer to prospects. They won’t have to worry about researching for keywords to optimize in your content since you will take care of it for them
- Make the offer time-sensitive. Putting a deadline on your offer encourages people to act impulsively upon your offer. This usually leads to higher conversions because they fear of losing a good offer on the table.
If you do this properly, you can enjoy double the response rate of your email campaign without increasing your marketing spend!
Conclusion
With everything mentioned about email personalization, one thing should be very clear:
It’s all about building trust with your prospects.
Here’s the thing:
Without trust, you won’t have clients. It’s as simple as that.
With email personalization, you get potential clients to trust you.
By showing them that you know their needs and have an offer that hits the spot, you show to them that you know your stuff!
And by showcasing your knowledge and expertise as a freelancer, then you earn their respect.
In time, you should be able to generate a client or two from your campaign!
Now, about the tools…
There are two specific ways you can approach email personalization.
First is through email marketing.
You must build an email list of your clients then send them highly targeted campaigns.
From there, you can segment accordingly and send special and time-sensitive offers to convert subscribers into customers.
With this approach, you can use Engagebay*.
It is your all-in-one marketing automation suite that lets you:
- Gather emails using the tool’s pop-up features and landing pages
- Create automated drip campaigns to bring subscribers down your sales funnel
- A/B testing to analyze the best performing emails of your campaign
With Engagebay’s very competitive pricing, you simply cannot fail with it!
The other approach is cold email outreach.
You send prospects cold pitches asking them to hire you.
That’s the gist of this approach.
But compared to email marketing, this is much more difficult to pull off.
Since you’re reaching out to people whom you’ve never had contact before, convincing them to become your client would be a tall order.
However, it all boils down to good copy and the right approach to get them to trust you.
In my humble opinion, the best cold email tool is FindThatLead*.
It serves two functions:
- Find emails of prospects or niches and disciplines you specialize in. The tool also computes for the accuracy of the email to avoid a high email bounce rate.
- Send cold emails to them from the tool. It also shows data of the campaign’s performance to help you understand what you must improve on.
Really, it’s an awesome tool that saves you time from searching for prospects and sending them cold emails.
Now that you have all the information about email personalization, what are you waiting for?
Get cracking on your email campaigns now and grow your sales!