Email personalization - the most underrated tool to increase customer engagement

In any SaaS business, emails are a primary channel for onboarding new customers, communicating new product features, notifying new strategies and getting feedback.

However, it's challenging to move the needle following old practices.

For instance, it is now considered outdated and counterproductive to produce email campaigns that are de-correlated to the reality of your customers' relationship to your product or service.

To change this, email hyper-personalization can be leveraged. What is it exactly?
Communications triggered by real time events in your user’s lifecycle. It is a tool that goes one step further from traditional marketing to enhancing your product adoption and driving a flow of customer engagement.

When you hear personalization you probably think it’s about knowing about customers’ names and demographics.  However, to move things you need to think beyond these general tactics.

You probably have heard a lot of 'Email Marketing is dead now!'

If you believe - yes it is, let us change your mind in the next 2 minutes. However if I still believe - emails are the best way to ignite customer relationships, then join us in the discussion.

It's high time that you ditch your old email personalization rules today and learn the advanced email personalization tips to increase customer engagement.

Hyper Email personalization—What's in it for me?

Eventually, you're all prepared to execute email personalization. But, a simple question arises: is it really worth the effort?  

Why should you go one step ahead for hyper-personalization? If you can simply use general personalization while deploying easy-to-do tweaks through subscriber's name and address.

But let's be honest here! General personalization is just like purchasing a generic bulletproof jacket—that has all the right materials and looks like it will work, but it doesn't.

And similarly, you have invested in the best automation software. You are aware of your customer's needs, and it seems you have all the inputs to create convincing emails for your audience. But there's a caveat!

To test out your bulletproof jacket, you need to take a risky shot! And, the moment you realize the truth, you're dead.

However, to fight the urge of creating generalized emails you have to leave your cozy email routine. Generalized emails only work when your customers are completely obsessed with the product or you have a perfect monopoly in the industry. Which is likely to be the rarest case considering the myriad of alternatives existing for almost every software.

Also, think about it if you're not ready to give your best, maybe your competitor is!

And as per the study by SmarterHQ, 72% of customers will only engage with personalized messaging. On top of that this study implies that customers don't just appreciate personalization but simply expect one from brands.

How to improve customer experience with Email Personalization?

The sole aim of email personalization is to raise the bar of customer experience.

Leverage individual use cases

As personalization is a key to customer retention, you’ll need to gather concrete facts about your customer in order to unlock it.

Hyper targeting while utilizing interest checklists can give you amazing results.

You can also integrate your data feed with the NPS score to shoot personalized emails to the segmented audiences.

Free trials and timely discounts

Freemiums - the most popular model in the SaaS economy.

The reason why SaaS businesses are highly biased with freemiums or free trial periods- is that it helps them widen the top of the funnel, and later align the strategies to nudge customers for their paid solutions.

And after free trials, you can decrease the price for a limited time and— it is the second most effective tactic to drive action from the customers' side.

As this strategy creates a “fomo” among the customers and it also gives that crucial last push to customers to enter in the funnel.

Craft your emails according to the customer journey

Crafting personalized emails while mapping customer journeys needs alignment with the customers' goals.

To optimize its full potential, keep track of your customers and their current position in the customer journey from acquisition process to retention and re-engagement.

In the acquisition stage aim for educational emails, for retaining and win-back strategies go with promotional-offers emails.

Furthermore, in-app analytics are also one of the prime strategies to pull out information about customers' next steps that align with their goals.

Analyze your email data

By analyzing the data, you can perform A/B testing with a robust strategy to eliminate any non-performing KPI.

And then replace it with a third most relevant KPI to build reports.

Again, it also lets you focus on key areas that are worth more than dissipating effort in irrelevant actions.

Use an automation tool.

An automation tool will make your life easier. With Successeve you can create event-triggered automated workflows and integrate various action items that can help you automate the entire sequence.

5 SaaS customer success email you should be sending

After making your emails personalized, now it's time to whittle down a list of customer success emails; stimulate your product adoption strategies that also spark customer engagement and interactions.

Account Activation Emails

Accounts activation emails have the highest open rates as customers are most thrilled about the product when they join.

Furthermore, account activation emails are best to point out false accounts. It makes sure future updates reach your customers timely. It also confirms your emails don't end up in a spam folder—— hence completely ignored.

Make sure to send a good account activation email to your customer with warm greetings and triggering only one CTA at a time.

Welcome Emails

After a successful sign-up and account activation, it's time for a warm welcome.

Generally, welcome emails have a higher click-through rate, and best ways to start the interaction with users.

To ensure customers feel they have made the right decision by choosing your software—load these welcome emails with insightful tips and valuable onboarding videos.

Always keep in mind that a bad welcome experience can turn around the whole situation instantly and can make most of your new customers abandon ship at the last moment.

So to avoid such situations make it easy for your customer to work with the product without overwhelming them with countless features.

Pro-Tip Emails

Pro-tip emails play a crucial role in product adoption. Whenever any user faces issues and is stuck at any step—then it’s the responsibility of the customer success team to help them with proactive responses.

A pro-tip email improves your customer retention as no one wants to use a product they can't even operate smoothly. And most importantly if they can’t get hold of their customer success team.

Trail Ending Reminder Emails

Free trials are a great strategy to show your product value to your customers as they are not committing with your product by investing.

80% of free trial users use the product only for two days at most. So, while keeping the trial engaging, make sure to notify them about the ending date too.

Trail-ending reminder emails generate a sense of urgency in customers and make them grab limited-time opportunities promptly.

Upgrade Emails

Making your customer aware of your new upgrades is essential, but a dry notification can't do much. You can present them with an extended trial or a limited period offer to nudge them.

Don't annoy your customer by repeatedly asking to upgrade during their trial period. Deploy your move soon after the free trial ends with a relevant upgrade email.

Show them how this upgrade is beneficial for them with some testimonials or mini case studies. Then, leverage a clear CTA right after it.

Give them time to decide if they want to continue their relationship or drop out. 88% of customers are provenly affected by such offers.

Thus, it ensures higher customer trust and loyalty towards your brand and company.

Boost your customer engagement with Successeve

Salesmachine allows you to create engaging workflows which automates everything for your team.

Step 1 : Create a new workflow. You can do that by visiting the automations tab> select workflow> click on new workflow.

Step 2 : Name your workflow and add a description.

Step 3 : Select a trigger

• To select a trigger first you need to choose an entity—whether you want to target accounts or contacts.

• Choose the status type

• Choose the trigger type

Step 4 : Based on the trigger type choose the trigger. You can also add a filter to block any specific accounts or contacts to trigger the workflow.

Step 5 : Add actions

Step 6 : Enable the workflow to make it active.

Ending words

Email personalization has been around for a considerable amount of time yet most companies don’t do it the right way. Successeve helps you to leverage personalized email marketing with automations that help you add the right amount of human touch without extensive labor.

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