The Email Marketer's Guide to Hyper-Personalisation

Personalisation, it’s the gold standard of marketing.

In fact, 90% of leading marketers say personalisation significantly contributes to business profitability. And 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognise, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations.

However, 36% of consumers also say retailers need to do more to offer personalised experiences. Meaning that despite their best efforts, many brands just aren’t cutting it.

That’s where hyper-personalisation steps in.

Building upon the tactics and successes of traditional personalisation, hyper-personalisation satiates consumers’ needs for a fully personal, one-to-one shopping experience at their fingertips. Without the need for additional headcount or stress on current marketing teams.

In this guide, we will explore hyper-personalisation in email marketing. What it is, the benefits it can bring, how it can be executed, and inspirational examples to whet your appetite.

1. What is hyper-personalisation?
2. Benefits of hyper-personalisation
3. 5 step process to hyper-personalisation
4. 5 examples of hyper-personalisation in email
5. Next steps

What is hyper-personalisation?

We’ve all heard of personalisation, as marketers we all practise it in some form. But what is hyper-personalisation?

Where traditional personalisation typically involves using a limited amount of data and flexibility to create a tailored experience, hyper-personalisation goes a step further by creating a more granular and customised experience for each individual recipient. Using more advanced data analysis and machine learning techniques to understand each customer’s unique preferences, behaviours, and context.

This in turn helps businesses to deliver more targeted and relevant experiences, products, and services to each customer, which brings about significant benefits which we’ll go on to discuss.

Benefits of hyper-personalisation

We’ve skimmed over some of the benefits that hyper-personalisation can bring to businesses, but let’s delve into the specifics of email personalisation, and the significant impact it can make.

How can user generated content improve your results?

UGC is not only more influential than traditional advertising, but it’s also free, authentic, and engaging. As well as these, there are numerous benefits to UGC that can pay off big for brands and their results:

Higher engagement rates

Consumers not only love, but demand, a highly personalised experience from brands.

And their demands are only increasing, with 72% of consumers reporting they will only engage with personalised messaging.

With 64% of marketers reporting that customer experience is one of the top benefits to personalisation, it’s no surprise that these campaigns are producing better engagement rates all round.

More customers

By delivering hyper-personalised experiences, businesses can make the shopping process a breeze for customers. Removing unnecessary searching, comparisons, and disappointing purchases.

In fact, research shows that 80% of customers are more likely to shop with a brand that offers personalised experiences, and 76% of consumers are happy to share their data for more personalised communications.

Better retention

60% of consumers say they’ll become repeat customers after a personalised shopping experience.

Which is understandable. By offering relevant information and making the buying journey a simple, enjoyable experience for customers, why would they shop elsewhere?

Even better, the more a customer purchases, the more data a business can gather to continually improve their hyper-personalised campaigns to the individual.

Increased revenue

All of the above considered, it’s not a surprise that hyper-personalisation is a significant revenue driver.

By delivering content that strongly resonates with recipients and therefore encourages them to buy, hyper-personalised emails can generate up to 6x higher revenue. In fact, 89% of marketers see a positive ROI when they use personalisation in their campaigns

5 step process to hyper-personalisation

We hope by now you’re convinced that hyper-personalisation is a game changer when it comes to email marketing strategies.

However, email personalisation success doesn’t come easily. And requires planning, investment, and a little imagination before businesses can reap the benefits.

Here is our 5 step process to get you started:

Implement technology

Data, design, and automation are going to play key roles in sending hyper-personalised emails. So the right technology is a necessity.

This technology will usually come in the form of an automation platform, CRM, or business suite. One that offers data storage and management, campaign creation and execution, and measurement and reporting capabilities.

By implementing this technology, or working with an email marketing agency who has access to it, your business will have a one-stop-shop for sending hyper-personalised emails.

Collect data

Hyper-personalisation is impossible without data, so this step requires your full focus.

Combine the data you already have into one centralised place, likely within your newly implemented tech. This data could include preferences given at sign up, website browsing history, and past purchases.

This stage may require its own data capture strategy spanning multiple channels, dependent on your needs.

Create your emails

Whether you have the resource in-house, or using an email marketing agency, the email creation process is your chance to get creative. Fortunately, with the use of dynamic content you won’t have to create emails for every scenario. Instead, craft a template that will really engage with your recipients, and use dynamic content blocks to automatically populate the details you want personalised. This could be anything from imagery and copy to product recommendations.

Set up automation

This is where the magic happens.

Key to hyper-personalisation is sending the right message at the right time. Something that is only achievable at scale using your new technology.

The options are vast, so consider starting simply with abandoned basket reminders, welcome campaigns, or post-purchase follow ups. But let the personalised content within these emails make the impact.

Longer term, you can aspire to automations based on more granular stages in the customer journey or RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary) behaviour.

Test and optimise

Congratulations! You’ve set up your emails and they are successfully running in the background with little manual intervention required.

However, the hard work doesn’t stop there.

To make the very most of your efforts, you must continually test and optimise your campaigns for the best possible results.

Again, this can be achieved through the technology you have implemented, or the email marketing agency you are working with. And can incorporate a range of testing methods and criteria, such as A/B testing, heat mapping, or simply asking recipients for feedback.

5 examples of hyper-personalisation in email

It’s all well and good knowing how to send hyper-personalised emails, but sometimes we all need a little inspiration to spark our creativity.

Read on to learn 5 of our favourite uses of hyper-personalisation in email. Complete with real-life examples:

Product recommendations

Product recommendations really do offer the gold standard of hyper-personalisation. And can be utilised in a vast range of communications.

With a little creativity, data, and the right technology, the options are almost endless. And incredibly effective, with 80% of email recipients wanting to receive communications based on past purchases.

These recommendations could be based on past purchases, products or pages browsed, preferences, their sizing, surveys or quizzes completed, stage in the buying cycle, or the amount they regularly spend.

By combining this data alongside the use of dynamic content, brands can emulate a powerful personal shopping experience for every single individual.

For instance, recommending clothing items in the style they usually buy, in their perfect size, and in the currency of where they live.

Or, skincare recommendations based on a survey they have filled out, the seasonality of their location, and the pricing point they tend to spend at.

Below you’ll find a fantastic example of hyper-personalised product recommendations from Stitch Fix.

Stitch Fix go to lengths to gather a wealth of relevant data, such as measurements and sizing, favourite styles and colour, and body shape to help tailor their recommendations. Combined with behavioural data such as browsing and purchase history, their emails can be really impactful.

Pricing and availability

Product pricing and availability is constantly changing.

And for a customer who is excited about a purchase, nothing is more disappointing than realising the item is out of stock, or has increased in price.

Keeping stock and pricing updated manually is near impossible. However, with dynamic content, brands can automatically update their emails with real-time pricing and availability for specific products that each customer is most interested in.

For example, for items that a customer has browsed but has yet to purchase, brands can send an email promoting the item and updating its diminishing stock levels to encourage a purchase. Or let the customer know if the specific item has dropped in price.

Cult Beauty utilises wish list data to automate stock availability emails tailored to the individual. As well as featuring the item from the wish list, Cult Beauty pull through a range of additional data to tailor similar or complementary product recommendations whilst the recipient is engaged.

Basket and browse abandonment

Roughly 70% of consumers abandon their online baskets. That’s a serious amount of missed revenue.

The goal of abandoned basket and browse emails is to encourage the recipient to make the purchase, whilst removing any hurdles which could be stopping that.

Therefore, hyper-personalisation is essential to grab their attention.

By triggering these emails based on the recipient’s behaviour, brands are already personalising the timing of their communication. This can be enhanced by pulling through details of the product alongside relevant information, and even the associated reviews and ratings.

Brands can go one step further using (you’ve guessed it) hyper-personalised product recommendations. Such as similar products that have been rated highly, or may be at a lower price point.

We love the below abandoned browse email from Made. Not only do they follow up a browsing session with a reminder of the item, but they have also incorporated live pricing to trigger a sales notification.

Replenishment reminders

With the correct data, brands can identify who their regular customers are and make sure they keep them engaged.

As well as identifying these customers, they can also determine what they buy, and how often they buy it. Using this information brands can send out highly personalised replenishment reminders based on when the customer is most likely to purchase again.

This is particularly useful for food and groceries, medicine, and cosmetics. But the options are vast.

As well as personalising email with these specific products, brands can take their hyper-personalisation even further by using our favourite product recommendations tactic. Suggesting similar, add-on, and upsell products which are likely to be of interest to the individual.

And to ensure they make their purchase, brands can include a personalised discount code or special VIP price so that they are encouraged to purchase from the brand again.

Getting ahead of the purchase in this way is not only helpful to the individual, but also reduces that chance that the customer will shop with a competitor, or forget to replenish.

Thortful offers a great example of replenishment campaigns based on memorable dates.

The brand sends out reminders for key dates based on the recipient’s past purchases, and use dynamic content to pull through the recipient’s previous purchase to tailor the experience even further.

Geotargeting

A surprisingly underutilised hyper-personalisation tactic is geotargeting.

With the use of geotargeting, brands can identify the location of their recipient and serve them the most engaging content for where in the world they are.

And we’re not just talking about store locations (although, they are useful). Brands can dynamically populate their emails with the correct language and currency, imagery relevant to their country, and products based on seasonality.

For example, Deliveroo utilises geotargeting to tailor their email communications with restaurants local to the individual’s location, alongside past purchase history to identify the restaurants they are most likely to order from.

Next steps

Hyper-personalisation is exciting for businesses, marketers, and consumers.

But the best email marketing strategies don’t come easy. And with the amount of data, technology, and creativity required to execute stand-out campaigns, hyper-personalisation isn’t a tactic that can be executed in a day.

But once your tailored campaigns are set up and sending, the benefits cannot be ignored.

If you’re a brand that wants to bring hyper-personalised campaigns to your audience, but are overwhelmed with where to start, then we can help.

As email marketing experts, we have the knowledge, technology, and experience to help you every step of the way. From advice and support through to full-blown campaign management and execution.

So, why not get in touch to find out more?