The power of personalization
In today’s marketing world, personalized communications are no longer optional: it’s the new expectation.
In fact, according to McKinsey & Company:
- Companies that excel at marketing generate 40% more revenue from related activities than average players.
- 71% of consumers expect personalization from the brands they interact with.
- 76% of consumers get frustrated when they don’t get personalized outreach.
When we talk about personalization, we mean more than just including a recipient’s first name on the email (which you should do, but there are limitless possibilities). It means surfacing content that makes the most sense for them, based on their interests, engagement, purchase behavior, and more.
In this lesson, we’ll walk through an example of how you can personalize communications to a specific audience and share best practices to do so at scale. As you follow along, bookmark the message personalization reference for specific tags you can incorporate in your content.
Personalize your message for a particular audience
Picture this: Valentine’s Day is coming up, and Nani Health & Wellness is planning a holiday-inspired campaign with relevant incentives and recommendations for a few key audiences.
Two particular segments they’re targeting are:
- Female VIP shoppers who are purchasing for themselves.
- Female VIP shoppers who are purchasing for others.
Let’s review how Nani Health personalizes the first launch email within their larger omnichannel campaign to make it relevant and engaging for these profiles.
Nani adds a personalized product feed to their launch email that they think VIPs will love.
This feed is built to recommend items based off a recipient’s purchase history, specifically showing off items relevant to them that also fall with a higher than average price point. They do so because VIPs are more likely to purchase these more expensive products than typical engaged customers, so they put it front and center for them to see.
Learn more about personalized product feeds.
Before Valentine’s Day, Nani Health set up a targeted sign-up form to their VIPs to collect information on whether they are interested in receiving Valentine’s Day couples product recommendations.
They then used these profile properties to power a show/hide section for product recommendations.
For those who opt in to receive couples' recommendations, Nani markets their Couples gift baskets and packages.
For those who opt out of receiving that content, they share some standalone best-selling self-care items.
Learn more about show/hide content.
In their omnichannel campaign, Nani wants to ensure that they’ve removed their VIPs from future messages in the pathway once they purchase. Conversely, they do want to follow up with VIPs who did not open a previous messages to encourage a holiday purchase before it’s too late.
They utilized exit criteria and follow-up messaging in Klaviyo to both engage and disengage appropriately:
- Once someone completes a purchase, they are removed from the pathway at the point of purchase and don’t receive any other messages within the campaign, even if there are additional messages scheduled.
- If someone does not open a message within an omnichannel campaign and follow-up messaging is enabled for that message, those profiles will receive an additional nudge afterward to engage with the content.
Learn more about exit criteria and follow-up messaging.
In addition, Nani encourages their VIPs to purchase items similar to ones they’ve purchased previously. To do so, they’ve updated their abandoned cart flow.
More specifically, they complete the following steps:
- Drag in a conditional split for anyone who is in their VIP shopper segment.
- Add in a VIP specific email
Include a dynamic review block into that email to showcase reviews of products they’ve added to their cart, but haven’t yet purchased.
Learn more about dynamic review blocks.
Best practices for personalizing content
Now that you’ve reviewed an example as inspiration, let’s dive a bit deeper into each core strategy. Click into the dropdowns below to explore how you can scale these personalization best practices within your larger strategy.
Build personalized product feeds strategically
Personalized product feeds are a great way to showcase relevant content to the right people. Some additional best practices you should employ include:
- Utilize feed filters: Consider your audience, and add filters accordingly to further tailor your feeds.
- Example: display best sellers at a lower price point for low value shoppers or those who are churn risks (haven’t purchased within a set period of time, or who are labeled as At risk within your Marketing Analytics RFM data).
- Use show/hide blocks to display feeds to different people: Within the same email, you can feature a number of different product feeds and utilize show/hide logic to show the right products to the right audiences.
- Example: showcase common gift bundles to audience members who have shared that they are shopping for others during a major holiday sale. For those who have not shared this, show general best sellers.
- Layer them into key flows: Product feeds are especially effective in automated flows like welcome series, browse abandonment, abandoned cart, and winback flows.
- Example: Split your welcome flow based on whether someone placed an order after your first message. In your second message to those who haven’t purchased, include a feed of best sellers with a unique discount to shop while supplies last. For those who have already purchased, feature items often bundled with the product they purchased. With Marketing Analytics, you can quickly find items often bundled together to support this upsell initiative.
Showcase relevant reviews in automated emails
Reviews are powerful motivators to buy. In addition to using a dynamic review block in your abandoned cart flow, like the example above, you can also implement a dynamic review block in other metric-triggered flows that include product information.
Some of these flows include, but aren’t limited to:
- Browse abandonment
- Added to cart
- Checkout started
- Placed order
Level up your show/hide content targeting
Show and hide template blocks enable you to share tailored messages to specific people within the same email send. Some additional things you can do include:
- Create more robust logic: Show hide can be based on a single property, but you can get even more tailored by adding AND OR conditions into your criteria. Learn how to add AND OR conditions into your criteria.
- Add custom code logic: If you want even more control, you can build your logic using custom code. This is most helpful when you’re building conditions using event data, dates, and booleans. Learn how to build logic with custom code.
Examples of when to use show/hide blocks to advance your email content blocks:
- High value vs. low value shopper preferences.
- Preferences based on age, gender, or other demographic info.
- Pertinent announcements by location.
- First time shoppers vs. repeat shopper incentives.
- Has or has not purchased a specific item or category of item.
- Has or has not shopped online vs. in-store.
Incorporate exit criteria and follow-up messages across campaigns
Exit criteria and follow-up messaging are strong tools to tailor your sending cadence appropriately. As a best practice, utilize both features when sending multiple-message omnichannel campaigns to avoid over-messaging and give an extra nudge to only those who need it.
Examples of how you may refine your omnichannel pathways based on email engagement:
- If someone did not engage with your email and has opted into another channel.
- Follow up action: split path and transition to next priority channel (e.g., text).
- If someone did or did not convert upon clicking your email.
- Follow up action: reply via email with a time-limit to your discount or another level of urgency to buy.
- If someone engaged with your email, was active on site, but did not place an order.
- Follow up action: send a reminder email that includes product details of what they browsed.
- If someone subscribed via a social media lead ad recently, but has not engaged with your email.
- Follow up action: exit path, target with paid ads.