How to Personalize Your Emails with Only a First Name

Personalization is the key to getting positive engagements, but what happens when you lack the data for it?

There are still a lot of ways a team or a sales rep can go about personalization, even if they don’t have the data for it.

In this guide, we’ll show how you can harness 5 simple strategies to create a bespoke experience for email campaigns – even when all you have is an email address and a first name.

Why Personalize?

Personalization is powerful.

Fifty-two percent of your audience might go somewhere else if they don’t get personalized content from your end.

This just goes to show that personalization is an organization’s key to moving ahead of the competition.

The problem is, not everyone has access to a lot of customer data. There are a lot of email lists that lack a lot of customer data.

Here’s another issue.

Even if a marketing team had all the data that they needed about a customer, they would still need to go about personalization in a way that isn’t creepy.

Use Whatever Information You Have

Believe it or not, there’s a lot of information you might already have, and you can use these details to start personalizing your email campaigns.

Take, for example, official work email accounts.

They have one thing in common: the company’s domain in the address.

Even if the list doesn’t contain the company information of the recipient, you can easily extract it from the domain that you have. From that information, finding out about industry needs becomes more comfortable, and one customizes an email body to that type of data.

Marketing teams can even fine-tune email subjects lines to example email subjects lines such as:

Custom Solutions for {COMPANY NAME}

{COMPANY NAME} is cordially invited to a webinar

The same rules go with finding out the first or last name of a person from the email address itself.

Say you got the emails through a contact form, you can use whatever information you have in that form to create a certain level of personalization.

Simple things such as these go a long way because they pique the curiosity of the recipients. This results in improved open rates.
Related: Email Marketing Series: How to Make your Emails Impossible to Ignore

Use Location

Location is a powerful tool to customize emails.

You can use pictures from a particular location in your email and landing pages. Slang, phrases, and mention of unique things from the area can also be used to get on the same level as the prospect.

Getting the location of your recipients isn’t tricky. A quick way to personalize based on location is to research where their company office is located and customize your email to that area.

Phrase the Email in a Question

Don’t know much about a contact? Ask them for information.

An email can be harnessed to generate information about the recipient. However, this doesn’t mean enclosing an entire survey in an email.

In the email, you can get a person to respond to a question by enclosing strategically placed questions about their industry.

E.g.

{INDUSTRY_STATISTIC}, how do you fare?

By guessing their industry – based on their email domain – you might be able to get them to answer a question. This leads to engagement and more information about them.

Use Time

Make sure you’re sending emails based on the proper time zones.

Not everyone will be awake at the same time because we have time zones, so it’s generally a good idea to take note of the physical location of the recipient. Send emails in the morning and make sure you’re not sending in the middle of the night halfway across the world just because of its morning in your timezone.

Another use of time is customizing emails based on the seasons. There are different celebrations throughout the year, so it’s excellent time your organization took advantage of that.

Retarget the Emails

Here’s another technique that one can utilize along with their personalized email campaign, and it’s shown to have good results.

After sending them an email, throw these emails into a custom audience on Facebook, and target specific ads to them.

You can mention the subject of your email subtly through the ad.

It makes for a more customized experience because they are getting the message through two different channels.

Other Useful Tips:

Use behavioral triggers when they interact with your website to send them emails automatically, e.g., reminders to log in and check data, etc.
Don’t forget to personalize your contact information at the bottom of the email. It shows prospects that a real person is looking out for them. It’s a relational approach.
Start collecting information about your prospects to fine-tune what you have.

Customization is key to engagement, and there is no excuse for a marketing team not to be able to personalize emails in any campaign.

As one will observe, there are still several ways to create bespoke campaigns, even if you don’t have enough data. Email personalization is key to proper lead nurturing.