Restaurant Marketing & Customer Experience Blog

Personalized Email Marketing in Less Time? Here's How

Written by Robin Johnston | Jul 12, 2018 11:00:00 AM

You've done all the work to gather information to use email to get your customers coming back again and again. You may have gotten their email addresses a number of ways. If you collected the addresses through your free Wi-Fi or social media accounts, you probably already know a lot of things about your customers, including things like their: name; address; gender; educational level; marital status; income; and more. You would like to send personalized emails, but it seems like too much work. Don't worry. It's not. Here are simple ways to send personalized emails in far less time. 

Use Email Templates

Use a system that will allow you to create one email template, but  send out as many personalized, individual emails as you have on your subscribers' list.  Depending on the platform you use, you'll have a database field or token for a name. When it sees that token, it will replace with an email address. This will allow you to send many emails from one template, while including a personal touch in each email. 

Case studies have shown that emails and newsletters that use personalization experience higher conversion rates. If you use email personalization in the subject line, the recipient will be more likely to open your email.  

CELEBRATE YOUR CUSTOMER'S ANNIVERSARY

How long has your customer been visiting business? That is information you will have in your CRM or Wi-fi analytics software. If you have used social media, Wi-Fi sensors, and analyzed online and offline behavior, you will know a lot more than that and can gather information about a customer in your business, even if he or she is not using your Wi-Fi. Personalizing your emails will be simpler and faster with this data. Surveys have shown that more than half of customers want businesses to remember how long they have been coming. Craft an anniversary email for a customer that has been coming six months, a year, or longer. You could even offer a coupon, or special discount, too. 

Send a Happy Birthday Email

Have you started sending birthday emails yet? You should be doing it already. Statistics show that people open emails that mention their birthdays 200 times more often than they do other emails from businesses. Create a custom coupon or discount, based on the customer's past purchase behavior.

Create a Personalized Image in an Email

This could be something as simple as his or her name, or whether he is married or has children, while offering a discount. Do you know what he does for a living? You could send an email mentioning that, with a special offer you know he would appreciate. The more relevant your email is, the more likely it is that the customer will engage with it.

Use Your Customer's Name (Twice!)

Most emails will greet the recipient by first name, but including the individual's name again throughout the email will really catch their eye. 

Use Automated Trigger Emails 

Has your customer not visited for a while? Use your email system to automatically send emails to your customers based on a certain action or behavior, such as not coming for a certain amount of time. Studies have shown trigger emails to have a 152% higher open rate compared with traditional emails. They can help convert casual customers into lifelong ones. Even though they are personal, they can be easily automated and sent out for welcoming new customers, telling some customers you miss them, telling them you hope they had a happy birthday and thank them for coming in your business on that special day, and many other occasions. 

As you can see, sending personalized emails doesn't have to be time consuming or complicated. It can certainly be profitable.