Five Ways to Personalize Emails for New Subscribers

Personalized emails drive better performance and build stronger customer relationships. But without the right data, it’s hard to make those early messages relevant. This lack of data can be related to poor integration, missed data collection opportunities, and gaps in data practices.

Let’s look at several possibilities for the profiling of new email subscribers and what data opportunities are available in each case.

1. Already a Customer? Personalize Like You Know Them

While some consumers sign up for promotional emails before making their first purchase with a brand, others sign up after making multiple purchases, perhaps over several years.

When that’s the case, the past purchase data connected to a new subscriber via their email address, phone number, or another identifier can be used to inform personalization for the new subscriber.

Profiling opportunities:

• Past purchases may indicate a new subscriber’s preferences for product categories, brands, styles, price points, etc.
• When a new subscriber has only purchased once before, this information may be instrumental in getting a second purchase, which often leads to longer term loyalty.
• Even if a new subscriber has a rich purchase history with your brand, look for opportunities to present related products and adjacent product categories to expand the subscriber’s engagement footprint.

2. How to Use Browsing Data

Some new email subscribers haven’t made any purchases yet but have visited your website or other properties in the past, perhaps extensively. Using cookies, IP addresses, or other identifiers, you can connect this prior unknown visitor engagement to this new subscriber, giving you behaviors you can use for personalization.

This is data that many email marketing programs never connect to subscriber or customer profiles.

Profiling opportunities:

• Prior engagement may indicate a new subscriber’s preferences for product categories, brands, styles, price points, etc., which could be key to encouraging their first purchase.
• Because engagement isn’t as strong of an intent signal as purchases, you’ll want to be careful not to over-personalize content.

3. Turn Cross-Channel Signals into Smart Email Content

By matching their name, mailing address, phone number, or other identifiers, you can determine whether a new subscriber has engaged with your SMS, push, or direct mail campaigns or with your social media content.

In some cases, you may not have sufficient information to recognize that multiple channel users are indeed the behavior of one person until they’ve converted.

Profiling opportunities:

• Prior engagement with other channels may indicate a new email subscriber’s preferences for product categories, brands, styles, price points, etc., which could be key to encouraging their first purchase.
• Engagement with multiple channels tends to be an indicator of great customer lifetime value, so these subscribers should be treated as high priority.
• Engagement with multiple channels may indicate that a spouse, household member, or relative is making purchases on behalf of or influenced by this subscriber.

4. Get More Than Just an Email Address Without Killing Conversion

For a new subscriber with no purchase history and no brand interactions associated with their email address, any first-party cookie, or other identifiers, lean into data collection during signup and onboarding.

Profiling opportunities:

• Signup completion rates are highest when only asking for a visitor’s email address, but if your brand has demonstrated that collecting an additional data point or two significantly boosts subscriber engagement and retention, then require that as well. For example, some retailers find that collecting the subscriber’s zip code or, even better, favorite store location allows for highly relevant personalization.
• After collecting their email address as part of the opt-in, ask them to provide additional information on the opt-in confirmation page. This information should be optional, so including a brief explanation about how providing this information will benefit the new subscriber is wise.
• The signup source itself, along with previously mentioned factors, can tell you a lot about a subscriber. For example, an unknown visitor who signs up via a lightbox offering a 20%-off signup incentive may just be looking for a deal, so may prove to be very sensitive to message frequency. On the other hand, an existing customer who opts in during checkout may be less sensitive.
• Your welcome email series and onboarding efforts can similarly be used to collect additional information.

Read next!: Mastering the Welcome Series in Email Marketing

5. Use Third-Party Data to Fill the Gaps

Regardless of those other factors, once you know a prospect or customer’s email address, that identifier can be used to unlock data enrichment possibilities including public and private third-party data like demographic, geographic, and psychographic data.

For example, the Zeta Data Cloud offers access to 1.4B+ transactional signals and 1T+ monthly content consumption insights, providing intent data like competitive visitations, competitive transactions, and recent online content consumption. This kind of intel can be used to differentiate your messaging for those who you know are in the market.

Profiling opportunities:

• Adding third-party data to your customer profiles allows you to understand them more broadly as consumers, accelerating your relationship-building and profiling efforts.
• Adding intent data to your customer profiles allows you to better understand them and act on opportunities that would be missed if you relied solely on your first-party data signals.

Related video: The Zeta Data Cloud: Strategy, Governance and Vision

Maximizing the New Subscriber ‘Honeymoon’

Email subscribers tend to be the most engaged during their first weeks in your program—a phenomenon I refer to as the “signup honeymoon” in my book, Email Marketing Rules. Creating a great honeymoon experience sets up the relationship to be successful and long-lasting. In contrast, a lackluster honeymoon generally stops a new relationship from gaining traction.

To strengthen the honeymoon opportunity, first create some benchmarks around how the performance of your new promotional subscribers:

• What are your click rates among subscribers who have been on your list for 30 days or less? 60 days or less?
• What percentage of your subscribers who have been on your list for 30 days or less have clicked in at least one email? For 60 days or less?
• What percentage of your subscribers who have been on your list for 30 days or less have made a purchase, whether that’s directly through an email interaction or another channel? For 60 days or less?
• What percentage have made two or more purchases during those timeframes?

Feel free to capture other important milestones as well, but short-term email engagement and conversions tend to be big leading indicators for most brands.

Then use one or more of the data sources above to make your early messages more relevant through personalization, segmentation, or automation. Thirty days later, revisit your benchmarks and see if there’s early success. Experiment more, evolving and widening your use of this new data to see what else is possible.

Also test into optimizing your email cadence, as receiving too many emails is a top reason that new subscribers opt out.

While your testing metrics should be around short-term behaviors, know that stronger starts to email marketing relationships naturally lead to longer-lasting relationships with higher lifetime values. Sending more relevant messages early on helps prove to your prospects and customers that you recognize just how valuable their time is and are committed to not wasting it.