There’s more to personalised email than first names. All you need is a little human touch

Brands and I interact a lot. A Twitter rant here, a pat on the back for a lovely ad there, sometimes a firmly worded response to a sexist promotional email – we bond like two perfectly normal human beings. However, rarely do I, even as a very engaged consumer for most part, come across a memorable marketing email. And as it turns out, I am not the only one. According to Litmus, only 21 percent of consumers reported receiving a memorable promotional email in the last two months. Clearly, despite so much thought, hard work, and investment pumped into email marketing, memorability has not been very high on marketers’ agendas. And I can tell you from personal experience that memorability matters. A lot.

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If you are a new marketer and are just learning the ropes of email marketing, go out and look for inspiration. Signing up with “visibly cool brands” helps, as does a little Google search. Here are a few examples of promotional emails that I found rather interesting. I think you would too.

Happily Unmarried

As far as content goes, Happily Unmarried remains one of my favourite Indian brands. They filled a sore gap in brand marketing almost a decade ago with a website that made you laugh. Their emails too are usually very friendly, funny, and reminiscent of an instant messenger chat with a friend from college. And most importantly, Happily Unmarried remembers the things you liked, saved, and bought on their website, and uses it to their advantage in promotional email, albeit very irreverently. It is this irreverence that makes them stand out. Here is an example of one such email –

Anyone who shops regularly from brands like Happily Unmarried and Chumbak knows that apart from their irreverent tone and personality, it is the products that you fall in love with. This simple, friendly email from Happily Unmarried does a great job of product placement and playing on what they are certain is one of their strengths. Full marks for this one!

LinkedIn

Yet another brand that personalises its email really well is LinkedIn. Whether job updates or Pulse notifications, LinkedIn emails sound like they have done their homework well. Their job notifications are incredibly relevant, both in terms of role and location. Their Pulse notifications too don’t do one-size-fits-all industry-only relevant updates, but have articles similar to the ones you have read in the past.

Twitter

Twitter does a pretty good job of engaging its audience, whether it is through incessant opinion airing and bashing or through suggesting individuals or organisations Twitter believes you will like. After following a humorous feminist handle, it sent me a mail with similar handles. Very simple! But what really worked in Twitter’s favour here was that the suggestions have always been extremely relevant, whether in terms of brands or handles with a cause.

Netflix

Trust Netflix to always please the couch potato in us. With a database as overwhelming as the one Netflix has, one often ends up spending a lot of time looking for content that interests them. Seemingly aware of this challenge, Netflix regularly sends out personalised emails with new suggestions and alerts about new seasons of shows you have watched.

This not only ensures endless loyalty and reduces the need to look for content elsewhere, it also gives users the full value of their annual subscriptions.

Thirty five percent of Indian consumers want email communication from brands, and over 50 percent respond to email offers. Millennials across the world are developing relationships with brands on the basis of relatable, personalised, entertaining content. The time to get creative in your email marketing strategy is now. Get started or lose market share, brand marketers.

If you are a new brand marketer, here are some other resources and inspiration for you to strengthen your email marketing strategy –

• 5 examples of email marketing done right
• 6 email marketing strategies that can boost sales
• 3 reasons why email marketing is better than social media marketing
• How to improve your email marketing strategy in 2017
• Is email marketing really effective?