Email Academy recap: You had me at Hello [First Name]

In today’s crowded digital landscape, standing out in the inbox is more challenging than ever. In our latest Email Academy  session, “You Had Me at Hello,” Mailjet’s Principal Product Manager, Natalie Lynch, and Senior Email Marketing Manager, Julia Ritter, delved deep into the transformative power of email personalization and the impact it can have on your campaigns. 

They shared invaluable insights on moving beyond basic salutations (that’s you, INSERT FIRST NAME) to truly connect with your audience. We’ve summarized those key points for you below, but if you’d like to jump to straight to the full video, simply scroll to the end of the article.

True personalization transcends merely inserting a recipient’s first name into an email. As Julia emphasized, it’s about tailoring their experience and utilizing the information and the data you have to deliver content that’s relevant. This means moving beyond generic blasts to highly targeted messages that resonate with each individual.

Natalie underscored this point by showcasing the power of segmentation and dynamic content blocks within a single email, adapted using recipients’ data. For example, think about a travel or tourism company looking to adjust their content based on subscriber preferences. Wouldn’t it be great if you could tailor available hotels, peer-reviewed restaurants, and must-see monuments based on their location? Without having to create several different campaigns…

Not only would it save senders time, but this approach ensures that (while your message is broad enough for a large audience) specific sections become highly relevant to the individual.

In a world where 26% of email marketers receive as many as 50 emails a day, earning attention is crucial. You see, email engagement is not a given; it must be earned by demonstrating a deep understanding of your audience’s needs and preferences. Julia succinctly put it:

This giving them what they want is achieved through a combination of relevance, timing, and empathy. A good example shared during the webinar was from the airline Lufthansa – specifically an email sent 48 hours before a customer’s flight. 

Now, this wasn’t just a “hey, remember that flight you’ve got tomorrow” but a perfectly timed message that anticipates the recipient’s immediate needs, providing essential information like confirmation numbers, flight details, and links to other channels. As Natalie highlighted, this approach can be applied beyond airlines to any event or service where crucial instructions, parking details, or other relevant information exactly when the user needs it most. 

It shows empathy by understanding and addressing potential pain points before they even arise.

To truly personalize, you need to go beyond basic demographic data. Julia and Natalie highlighted several categories of data points that can be leveraged for effective segmentation and content tailoring:

• Basic information: Yes, we said you need to go beyond the basics for deeper personalization, but it’s important to start with the fundamentals like name, company, location, and preferred language, etc. You can grab all this data on sign-up with a form builder. 
• Behavioral cues: Track how users interact with your emails (opens, clicks, inactivity) and your website (purchase behavior, browsing history, abandoned carts, etc.). For instance, a “recap email” from a service like Loom that summarizes how much time you’ve saved is a fantastic example of behavioral personalization. Similarly, a clothing brand sending “curated styles based on what you’ve seen” after an abandoned cart is using behavioral data to re-engage. 
• Stated preferences: Information users explicitly provide, like their favorite color or communication frequency. OK, maybe not their favorite color (unless you’re working for a Dulux – but you get the idea).
• Inferred intent and lifecycle stage: Understand where a contact is in their journey with your brand. This could range from onboarding for a new trial to sending anniversary emails based on their signup date. The Duolingo “duoversary” email, celebrating how long a user has been with the platform, is a great “set and forget” example of this. 
• Contextual information: Consider the time of day, day of the week, or device type a user typically engages with your content. 

Julia also illustrated how she used poll responses from a previous webinar to send follow-up emails with content specifically addressing each participant’s biggest deliverability challenge, again showcasing personalization based on stated preferences and engagement.

Email automation is not the enemy of personalization; rather, it’s the key to scaling it efficiently. As Natalie clarified

This means setting up automated workflows for common recurring communications, such as annual anniversaries, onboarding sequences, or educational series. 

Within these automated emails, you can then embed dynamic fields, attributes, properties, and conditional logic. This allows a single automation to deliver highly personalized content to different segments of your audience without manual intervention. 

This approach, as demonstrated with the location-based content, significantly reduces manual effort while maximizing relevance. The ideal is to “set it, watch it, then adjust it” and allow for continuous optimization. We dedicated an entire Email Academy session to it if you’d like to know more.

Consistent and thorough testing is paramount to successful personalization.

Focus on A/B testing one variable at a time (e.g., subject lines, content, timing) to accurately assess its impact. This is because it’s important to establish cause and effect. If you test five different variables at a time, how are you to determine what exactly is impacting the results? It could be any one of the implemented changes.

Finally, be mindful of over-personalization, which can come across as creepy or “big brothery.” Always consider privacy laws and only use data that enhances the user experience, rather than making them uncomfortable.

You can watch the recording of the live webinar below: