Personalization of email marketing messages is crucial in today's ever-evolving marketplace. Personalization refers to using customer data to create much more effective email content because it can be tailored for each individual or each customer persona.
Using personalized messaging has been proven to improve open rates and generate more revenue because it allows restaurant marketing professionals to create more relevant content that will more effectively pique the interest of the consumer.
By collecting customer data through your WiFi access points, and grouping those customers into separate lists, marketers can avoid sending out a single mass-message in hopes that it resonates well with at least some of the audience.
Instead, they can focus on sending highly targeted messages to each customer segment, increasing open rates and encouraging more engagement.
How to Collect Individual Customer Data
To execute an effective personalized email marketing campaign, you'll need to have comprehensive data about your individual customers. There are various ways in which to collect customer data, but most are either expensive or take a great deal of time and energy.
The only way to gather enough data to effectively create a personalized campaign is to use a quality WiFi Analytics platform. Using WiFi technology, you’ll be able to capture data directly from your customers when they log into your WiFi access point. This will allow you to passively gather the necessary individual customer information required for proper personalization.
Using progressive profiling, data such as name, email address, phone number, age, gender, birthday and other information is entered by the customer each time they log back into your WiFi.
In addition to all of this demographic information, the WiFi analytics platform also tracks the physical behavior of your customers, logging things such as dwell times, repeat visits, coupon redemption, days of the week and hours of the day they have visited.
With this kind of thorough and reliable data, marketers can begin using it to build powerful, data-driven targeted email marketing campaigns.
Using Data to Build Personalized Marketing Messages
According to research from Salesforce, the world’s #1 customer relationship management platform, data targeting and segmenting was used 51% more by overperforming businesses than those who were underperforming. This makes perfect sense when thinking about today’s consumers. They expect personalized messaging and they know when they’re receiving a simple generic mass-marketing message.
The simplest way to get started creating personalized campaigns is to make your customer profile data filterable. This will allow you to start building segments of specific customers based on their demographics and behavior data.
Email Segmentation for Marketing
It is important to be able to save these segmented lists so you don’t have to build them each time you want to send out a message.
Some examples of segmented lists might include:
- Women over 30 who visited on Mother’s Day of last year
- Any customer who has visited more than x times
- Customers whose average dwell time is under 20 minutes
- Men below 45 years old who have only visited your establishment once
- Women/Men who only visit at lunchtime
As you can imagine, these specific audiences would likely respond best to entirely different marketing messages. Being able to segment your customer list allows this to happen.
While building these lists, you’ll need to be brainstorming about how to effectively engage these groups. As you go through this process, ask yourself and your team members these questions:
- What kind of action do I want this customer to take?
- What is the best way to reach this customer?
- What kind of deals or promotions would interest this customer?
- What kind of deals and promotions would this customer NOT be interested in?
- What new products or services might engage this customer?
- What are this customer’s pain points? Why do they need what I offer?
- How can I attract and engage more customers like this?
- What type of imagery would engage this customer?
Always Be Testing
Now that you have your customer segments properly defined, and you have an idea of the marketing messages and promotions you want to send to them, it’s time to get started. When you create and send your marketing message to each list, it is vital that you monitor the ROI of each campaign.
As initial results come in, analyze the results and keep them documented in your platform. The next time you send a message to each group, you’ll want to make a small change to the message. You should only make a single change to the message while testing. Send the message and compare its results to the original message. If results are not as good as the original, go back to your original message and test a different aspect of the message. If results are better, keep the change and continue testing and optimizing over time. This is known as A/B testing.
Also, don’t forget that you’re not just targeting current customers. You should also be seeking out new lookalike prospects online and targeting them in an effective manner using the data you’ve collected. These prospects should have a higher probability of becoming a new customer, providing a more cost-effective means of acquiring new customers.
Final Thoughts On Email Personalization
Personalizing your email marketing messages with reliable customer data has been proven as an effective way to deliver relevant and engaging marketing content to your customers. This adds value to their experience and can quickly improve your open rates and subsequent revenue.
Using a WiFi marketing and analytics platform to collect a large volume of the right data, personalizing your marketing campaigns has never been easier. You’ll feel confident as you make solid data-driven decisions, drive company growth and build a much larger base of loyal customers.
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