Get Started with Email Personalization
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the value of personalizing marketing content.
- Explain when to use key personalization features in Marketing Cloud Next.
A Look at Personalized Email Content
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next brings together marketing automation and real-time data to help businesses grow. It’s built on Data Cloud, so your marketing, sales, services, and commerce teams can work on one platform. This gives your customers relevant, personalized interactions, powered by unified data. Instead of sending generic offers or messages to customers, you can send emails that are specific to them, including their name or organization and promotions that are relevant to their location or interests.
Isabelle Givens is the Manager of Digital Marketing at Northern Trail Outfitters. She wants to promote new hiking boots in an email. In the past, Isabelle has sent the same generic email to customers, but she knows that this strategy isn’t effective. Her team’s emails haven’t gotten high open rates or clicks. And, as a result, her team didn't meet its campaign revenue and sales goals.
What if she tailored her email content to each customer? Then, each customer would feel like she’s speaking directly to them. That's where email personalization comes in, and Marketing Cloud Next is her go-to application for making it happen!
Why Personalized Content Matters
Marketing has evolved to be specific to each customer, and personalization is a must-have. Marketers track data ranging from their customers’ purchase history, preferred devices, to the time of day that they like to receive messages. They can leverage this information about customers to more effectively target email campaigns.
Because customers now expect a tailored experience, emails that feel generic are often ignored or deleted. In fact, according to Straits Research 2021 Email Marketing Report, personalized emails achieve 6x higher transaction rates, 29% higher open rates, and 41% higher click-through rates. Tailored messaging strengthens customer relationships and boosts brand engagement.
Key Features of Personalized Content
Marketing Cloud Next offers powerful features to help you personalize your marketing emails. Let's dive into a few of them.
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Dynamic Content Variations: Display different variations of headings, subject lines, content sections, or buttons depending on the customer who receives it.
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Merge Fields: Provide easy and quick personalization by automatically adding in customer names, order amounts, or other specific data.
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Repeater Components: Show a series of items in an engaging, customer-friendly way, for example, promote related events or provide product recommendations.
Stay tuned, as we’ll go into a little more detail about these features in Unit 3.
Wrap It Up
Personalizing your marketing emails is vital to connecting with your audience. It can lead to higher open and click rates, better engagement, and ultimately, more ROI. And, Marketing Cloud Next offers key features you can use to personalize your emails and speak to your customers. Next, let’s learn more about the data sources that serve as the foundation for your personalized marketing emails!