How to Choose the Right Email Marketing Agency for Personalization

No one wants to send emails that languish unread in recipients’ inboxes. Personalization is key if you want your email campaigns to truly connect with your contacts. But how can you make that personalization ideal a reality? 

The right email marketing agency can make all the difference. Find an agency who checks these three crucial boxes.

1. Prioritizes Personalization

Today, a whopping 78 percent of marketers are using personalization in their email marketing—more than any other digital marketing channel. However, not everyone approaches personalization the same way. 

Look for an agency who prioritizes personalization rather than treating it as an afterthought. Personalization isn’t just a nice bonus or the cherry on top of a good marketing campaign; personalization should inform every aspect of your email marketing campaigns, from strategy to execution and beyond.

Allowing Personalization to Inform Your Strategy

Look for an email marketing agency that will help you define your goals and determine the best ways to connect with your customers on a more personal level in their inboxes. 

How can you use personalized emails to help you build your brand and foster strong customer relationships that extend beyond email inboxes? How can you use personalized email campaigns to boost revenue? The right email marketing partner should be able to help you answer these questions and understand both the why and the how of personalization. 

Why Personalization Should Be a Top Priority

The right agency will understand just how critical personalization is to success in the modern email marketing landscape. 

Modern consumers are tired of generic marketing messages, and yet more than 9 out of 10 internet users said they were still receiving irrelevant marketing messages in a 2019 survey. This same survey found that 44 percent of respondents were willing to switch brands if the alternative brand was better at personalization.

If you want to keep up with modern consumers’ expectations and maintain a competitive edge in the market, personalization is an absolute must.

2. Digs into the Data

In order to make personalization happen, you need an agency partner who’s willing to roll up their sleeves and dig into your customer and marketing data.

Getting to Know Your Customers

Analyzing your customer relationship management (CRM) data is a foundational step to making personalization possible. How can you connect with your customers on a personal level if you don’t know much about who they are or their relationship with your brand? Some data points that are primed for personalization include your leads’ and customers’:

• Names
• Demographics
• Geographical locations
• Buying history and behaviors
• Interests
• Industry and job positions (in the case of B2B marketing)
• Loyalty status

Keeping It Clean

The right email marketing agency will ensure you have access to the data you need to drive your personalized campaigns. If you have messy or incomplete data, this may mean starting at square one with a cleanup of your database, creating a single view of each customer, and filling in gaps where they may exist.

Turning Data into Personalization 

Once you have data on your customers, you can segment them into groups so you can send targeted email campaigns rather than generic ones. According to HubSpot research, subscriber segmentation tops the list of the most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns. 

On top of segmented email campaigns, you can start sending hyper-personalized emails that are tailor-made for their individual recipients. For example, you could provide a birthday promo or recommend a specific product. With the right data, the possibilities are endless.

3. Refines Results

To ensure you’re maximizing the ROI for your email campaigns, your email marketing partner should carefully track your campaigns and their results. 

Tracking the Right Metrics

This means diving into the analytics on individual campaigns and your sales metrics as a whole to see where your email marketing is succeeding and where it may be falling short. Your campaign goals should inform the metrics your marketing agency partner tracks. 

Are you trying to increase open rates? Reduce instances of abandoned carts? Boost loyalty program enrollment? Whatever you’re concentrating on, your email marketing agency should be able to tell exactly how effective your email strategy is in driving those results. This data can help to inform future campaigns that are even more impactful. 

For example, Baesman worked with Stanley Steemer to revamp the brand’s direct mail and email marketing. By tracking results, we were able to demonstrate that the new email strategy we implemented led to a 23 percent increase in online booking!

Letting Your Agency Do the Heavy Lifting

Tracking results is easier said than done because data can be messy and complicated, but the right tools and expertise can make a huge difference. Your team shouldn’t have to learn or code an analytics solution.

An agency partner like Baesman can manage all your reporting and can refine campaigns accordingly so you can drive better results with each one.

Partner with Baesman for Hard-Hitting Personalized Email Campaigns 

Baesman helps brands like yours every day with email and SMS marketing services. Personalization informs everything we do, so you can be sure we’ll dig into your data and find the very best ways to help you form real connections with your customers. 

Want to know how you’re doing when it comes to your use of customer data? Take a moment to fill out this free CRM & Analytics Checkup!