How to send personalized emails
A personalized email is one that directly addresses a consumer and shares content that’s tailored for them based on previous marketing engagement, purchase history, or characteristics. The more personalized you are, the more relevant your message will be to a recipient; thus, boosting opens, clicks, and conversions.
In this lesson, you’ll take a more proactive approach to marketing by completing the following:
- Identify your target audience
- Design personalized emails
Note: This resource will be most beneficial to those with a foundational understanding of profile properties and how to collect them in Klaviyo. If you do not, please review our profile properties reference before continuing with this guide.
Identify key segments to target
First, let’s decide who you should target with your message. Do not skip this step!
Before you can build more personalized emails to subscribers, you need to truly understand them. With segments, you can hone in on a specific audience based on profile properties (i.e., qualities about them) and what they have done in the past. Below are some great segments to create as a starting point. Use these as inspiration and customize them to best fit your needs.
Highly engaged subscribers
Highly engaged subscribers either open or click your content regularly, or recently signed up for marketing. Send them content based on what they just signed up for or engaged with to drive further interactions.
For instance, you may build any of the following segments:
- VIP subscribers: those who reliably open your emails and shop from your store.
- Recently engaged users: those who opened your emails recently, say in the last week.
- New sign-ups: those who just signed up for marketing, but may not have ordered yet.
Below is an example of a segment of recently engaged subscribers. For more insights on building engaged segments based on activity, head to How to create customer persona segments based on activity.
Customers to re-engage
These customers are those who you’d like to re-engage based on past behavior that indicates that they may need an extra nudge to purchase.
There are several types of people who you may want to re-engage, so consider what reasoning works for your use case. Then, build from there. For instance, you may build the following segments:
- Customers who have purchased recently that you can cross-sell relevant items to.
- Customers whose expected next order date has passed.
- Customers who recently browsed your site, but did not purchase.
The example below will hone in on recent window shoppers, meaning they were active on your site in the last week but never placed an order. A gentle reminder via email may be just what they need to return to your site and shop from your store.
Demographic groups
This type of a segment groups your audience based on specific characteristics about them, which are saved as profile properties in Klaviyo.
The demographic information you use to build your segments varies based on your own customer personas that you hope to target. That said, common demographic segments are based on someone’s:
- Predicted gender
- Geographic location
- Interests (hobbies, taste preferences, etc.)
- Product preferences (size, fit, feel, color, etc.)
For instance, say you sell sports merchandise. The segment below targets women from Boston; you may send content promoting women's apparel for a Boston sports team.
Design personalized emails
Once you’ve determined who to target, it’s time to build out email content. Let’s run through a few key strategies to seamlessly tailor your email sends to each individual recipient.
Add personalization tags
Personalization tags populate content about a recipient, such as their first name, favorite color, or recently viewed items. You can add them directly into your email template copy as well as the subject line.
How:
- Select personalization tags by clicking Personalization in the email editor when building your next message.
- Add default text; meaning, if Klaviyo does not have a value for the property, then default text will appear in its place. (e.g., if you start your email with: Hi there {{ person|lookup:"First Name"|default:'friend' }} and you do not have their first name saved, then the email will say: “Hi there friend”).
Show or hide specific content blocks
Show/hide blocks will only appear to certain recipients. That means that you can save time by building one base email, and then set certain portions of that email to only appear to those who relate to the content.
How:
- Select the block you want to appear to certain groups.
- Select Display.
- Click Create Logic.
- Add this condition: person|lookup:'Profile property' == 'Property value'.
Note: While show/hide blocks are a great time-saving personalization tool, you may want to create separate emails for each target segment instead when your email becomes particularly lengthy.
Promote relevant products
Incorporate relevant product blocks in emails to spur a customer’s next purchase. For instance, show information based on what they recently browsed.
How:
You can create either of the following blocks to add in to emails by dragging in the Product option from the email template editor:
- Static: will show product information that you manually select from your catalog; then, target a segment that may be interested in this.
- Dynamic: will populate the product information most relevant to your recipient based on conditions you set and by pulling it from a dynamic catalog feed.
Incorporate customer reviews
Feature 4- to 5-star reviews of a relevant product. Select the exact product you’d like to highlight and send to those who are likely interested but need to see social proof that the item is worth the purchase.
How: You must enable reviews in your account in order to access this option. From there, you can:
- Drag a Review quote block into your email.
- Select the review you’d like to feature by clicking either Static orDynamic.
- Customize the format to align with the style of your email.