Personalising the subject and content of the email

Email marketing today is not about mass mailings, which are most often perceived as spam by both people and algorithms. Nor is email marketing a tool for instant sales. Its purpose is to prepare the recipient to make a purchase. This is precisely why personalisation has become one of the key tools of email marketing. The most important one, and one that is constantly evolving.

In this article, the experts at TONOP have compiled the most significant changes which, in our view, have the greatest impact on the effectiveness of email campaigns. Over the last few years, several fundamental aspects have changed simultaneously.

Addressing the recipient by name has long been the norm. A few years ago, this really did make a message stand out amongst dozens of others. But today, it is no longer a sign of special consideration and has nothing to do with personalisation.

Research shows that an email personalised only in the subject line is perceived as a gimmick - and backfires on the sender. The name creates an expectation that the message is relevant, i.e. addressed specifically to the recipient.

If, upon opening the email, it turns out to be a standard mass mailing, a sense of deception arises and trust in such emails diminishes.

That is why personalisation is gradually shifting away from demographic data - such as name, age or city - towards user behaviour. It is far more important to understand what a person has recently searched for, which products they have viewed, what they have already purchased, and at what stage of their relationship with the company they currently are.

The economics of email marketing have changed, according to experts at TON OP company. Friday promotions, seasonal offers and festive mailings still work, but are significantly less effective if they are not linked to a specific user’s actions. Triggered emails in response to user actions are more important: signing up, viewing a product, adding it to the basket, placing an order, or not having visited the site for a long time.

Such emails are not perceived as advertising. The content, the body of the email and its subject line must be tailored to the recipient and their interests.

• Newsletters and content: in the mornings, from Tuesday to Thursday.
• Promotional/sales emails: in the evenings or at weekends.
• Abandoned basket or reactivation emails: sent as close as possible to the actual behaviour; it is not the timing that matters, but the relevance.

For a long time, the open rate was considered the key metric in email marketing. The higher the open rate, the more successful the campaign.

Today, this logic no longer holds true.

Since the introduction of Apple Mail Privacy Protection, some opens are recorded automatically. An email may be marked as opened even if the recipient has not read it. As a result, companies receive impressive statistics that increasingly fail to reflect actual user behaviour.

This creates yet another problem. Many services automatically select the best time to send emails based precisely on open rates. If the open rate data becomes inaccurate, the algorithms start optimising email campaigns based on false signals.

That is why, today, more and more companies are shifting their focus away from the open rate towards metrics that reflect actual user actions (clicks, replies, conversions) and the revenue generated by each email.

Modern personalisation is no longer a separate element of an email, but a unified chain: the subject line, the email body and the landing page must all convey the same message. If the subject line promises a discount on a specific product, the email body must continue that conversation. Once they click through, the recipient should be taken straight to the relevant page, rather than having to search for the offer themselves, according to experts at TON OP Bulgaria.

There is a second aspect to this consistency - deliverability. Email services assess engagement to determine whether an email ends up in the ‘Inbox’, the ‘Promotions’ tab or the spam folder. Algorithms assess the sender’s reputation and audience engagement. And emails that are neither opened nor read gradually stop reaching the recipient - or, to be more precise, the recipient simply does not see them.

In other words, poor personalisation has a double impact: first on the response rate, and then on the very fact of delivery.

The main conclusion we reached turned out to be unexpected. Almost none of the above can be described as new technology. Triggered emails, segmentation, personalisation and working with metrics have been around for a long time.

What has changed is the user themselves. They now receive more emails, make decisions more quickly and find it much easier to ignore anything that does not relate to them personally.

Personalisation without useful content and an understanding of the real person behind it loses its meaning. It is precisely the usefulness of the material sent that determines whether an email will become yet another unread newsletter or the start of a conversation with a future customer.

And modern personalisation should be assessed not by the number of opens, but by what really matters to a specific business: not clicks and conversions, but repeat purchases and the revenue generated by each email.

TONOP’s specialists develop innovative business promotion programmes for the platform’s clients and partners: from strategic planning to actual implementation. Integrating the TONOP programme with your company’s CRM system will enable you to process data on potential and existing customers online, from the first point of contact right through to the purchase.