How to be Perfectly Personal in your Emails

by Victor Green
3 mins read

Let’s face it: emailing is far from the most personal way to connect to your customers. A virtual salutation is nothing at all like a handshake. Of course, emailing has massive productivity benefits over how business used to be conducted before the internet, but the truth is that it’s quite easy to lose the personal touch when connecting to your customers solely through a screen. The correct way to approach email marketing is to find a balance between detached efficiency and involved empathy. Here are some tips to help you find your way to perfectly personalized emails.

Establish your Customer’s Persona

Being the hard working, well-informed entrepreneur that you are, you’ve put a lot of time and effort in discovering exactly who your customers are. It’s important not to let all that information go to waste, as it can go a long way in helping you form a connection with your client. “Having well thought out buyer personas, the visions of your ideal customers, is crucial, because it will influence how you target your audience,” says Hubspot contributor Andy Pitre. “As you’re crafting your personas, think about your best customers’ demographic information, job level, specific pain points, and their goals.”

Include Personal Information in your Email

Pitre writes: “As a good marketer, you’ve spent time and energy colleting rich information about your leads like their name, industry, etc., and including that information in your email body will make your emails feel even more personal.” Pitre goes on to give a perfect example of how to include personal information in a reply: “If you’re sending a follow-up email to someone who downloaded one of your ebooks, you can start off the email by saying, ‘Thanks for downloading!’ Using dynamic tags within your email marketing tool can make this possible.”

Video is your Friend

Of course, we’re not implying that you send out your favorite funny cat YouTube video to every email address on your list — unless, you happen to be in the feline business – in which case something like that would not be anything short of genius. However, there are certainly some occasions where video is the perfect medium to hammer your email’s point home. According to Forbes contributor William Arruda, “If email is the way to get to people, but the message requires a more robust medium, send a video in your email. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then video is worth at least a hundred thousand. Video also helps when you want to explain, cut through the clutter, or make a personalized impression.”

Read your Email out Loud

As silly as it might sound, it’s important for anyone working in the field of virtual advertising not to lose the inherent human connection they have with their buyers. Sitting in front of a screen for hours on end can lead to a sense of disconnection and depersonalization with the people you work with. This is why it’s important for email marketers to employ certain techniques to keep their work as personal as possible. Reading an email out loud, for instance, can shine a light on certain errors that your initial draft might have contained. “Before sending your email, read it out loud to see if it accurately conveys your message,” writes Arruda. “One reason our inboxes are overloaded is that it sometimes takes several emails to clear up confusion. If you make the email precise the first time, you’ll please your reader and reduce clutter – theirs and yours. This is especially important for nuanced communications about sensitive or complex topics.”

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