The 1-2-3 Guide to Personalized Email Marketing

Personalized email marketing is a core part of every successful B2B marketing strategy today. Not only does it meet customers on a channel where they love to communicate—email—it also aligns with their desire for personalized experiences at every stage of the marketing and sales cycle.

But executing a personalized email marketing strategy is challenging for many marketing teams. To do it at scale, companies need access to certain tools and technologies. To personalize in ways that resonate, they need expertise about email engagement and the ability to continually refine their approaches.

In this guide, we’ll explain how to do both with 7 actionable steps for creating a personalized email marketing strategy that delivers results.

Quick Takeaways:

• Email is the most-preferred method of brand communication, and personalized engagement is a top priority for B2B buyers.
• Automation and modern tech tools enable companies to execute personalized email marketing without sacrificing quality.
• Defining and segmenting your target audiences sets the foundation for email personalization.
• Tactics like compelling subject lines and dynamic content insertion make emails more engaging for target recipients.
• It’s essential to use data insights and metrics to continually refine personalized email marketing strategies.

Email and Personalization: Two Top Customer Priorities

Personalized email marketing offers the best of both worlds when it comes to engaging potential buyers effectively in the modern B2B world. Despite how full our inboxes are (the average professional receives more than 120 messages every day), email is still by far the most-preferred way to communicate with businesses today.

At the same time, more than 80% of B2B decision makers now say that being treated like a person, not a number, is essential to winning their business. That means they want to receive communication that’s attuned to their specific experiences, needs, and preferences—not mass-marketed to them as part of a thoughtless email blast.

Fortunately, the right tools and technologies exist today to deliver email at a high volume and with high levels of personalization. In the next section, we’ll walk through 7 steps to achieving this.

7 Steps to Execute Personalized Email Marketing

Define Your Target Audience

The foundation of personalized email marketing begins with defining your target audience. Understand your ideal recipients—what they like, their interests, and their pain points. This knowledge enables you to craft emails that resonate with potential customers, increasing the likelihood of engagement.

Developing solid ideal customer profiles (ICPs) to describe your target customers at the organizational level, then defining buyer personas for their key decision makers can go a long way in identifying exactly how you need to personalize your emails.

Collect and Segment Customer Data

Data is the lifeblood of personalized email marketing. To do it effectively, collect and organize customer data into segments based on demographics, behavior, or purchase history. Segmentation enables you to send emails tailored to specific groups, delivering more relevant content to each recipient.

Create Personalized Email Content

Personalize email content with tactics like using the recipient’s name, referencing past interactions with your business, including dynamic content, or recommending products and services based on their preferences. These seemingly small steps can go a long way in showing your customers you care about delivering solutions for them specifically.

Believe it or not, it’s also often the reason B2B decision makers choose one quality vendor over another. A recent survey found that 68% of buyers said the top reason they chose their current vendor is because they demonstrated the strongest knowledge of their company and its needs.

Craft Compelling Subject Lines

About half of all email recipients decide whether or not to open an email based on the subject line. This makes sense—after all, the subject line serves as any email’s first impression. Be sure to think about how to personalize subject lines both through the tactics mentioned already (such as name inclusion) as well as with messaging tailored to catch the attention of specific audiences or recipients.

Use Email Automation

Email automation is essential to execute personalized email marketing at scale. By using tools like email marketing platforms and CRM systems to automate and streamline email workflows, you can send more personalized and frequent messages (ex: welcome messages, follow-ups, and drop campaigns) without sacrificing content quality or requiring hours of manual work.

Implement A/B Testing

Harness the power of A/B testing to experiment with different elements in your email campaigns. Test variables like subject lines, content, visuals, and send times to determine what resonates best with your audience. Analyze the results by customer segment to determine what’s working best for each of your target audience groups.

Analyze and Refine Your Email Marketing Strategy

Regularly assess the performance of your email campaigns. Monitor key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, response rates, and conversion rates. Use data insights to refine and adapt your email marketing strategy, ensuring it remains effective and aligned with your business goals.

Let Televerde Help You Execute

Televerde can help you execute key parts of your marketing strategy—like personalized email—with our turnkey demand-gen, sales, and customer experience solutions. By outsourcing to an email marketing company, you can access industry-leading expertise and technologies to level up your strategy without having to invest in the infrastructure required to execute on your own.

Plus, you can trust Televerde to deliver solutions that actually yield results. We’ve been a trusted partner in outsourced B2B sales, marketing, and customer experience solutions for nearly three decades.

Ready to learn more about how we can help you grow your business? Schedule a consultation today.