Image Personalization for Improved Customer Engagement & CTR

 

In the past, businesses personalize their direct mail campaign with poster boards or hand written cards to show care and value to their customers, many of whom still do it today.

The email marketing industry is changing. Today, more and more marketers are experimenting with new strategies and tactics to improve their email marketing results. One of which is incorporating personalized images to their subscribers to help them convert leads into customers and drive revenue growth.

Image personalization has now become an essential component of email marketing campaigns. Through tailored images, you can improve user experience and boost email open rates. In this article, I’m gonna explain what image personalization is all about. I will also be sharing with you my trusted image personalization tools to help you create engaging email marketing campaigns.

What is Image Personalization?

Image personalization is one of the best ways marketers can improve their email marketing results. It is a process of creating customized images or photos to tailor the campaign’s messages with personalized experience. Most subscribers have a preference to click on and read emails with personalization. By using personalized designs, it can increase user engagement and promote conversion between clicks on an ad (clicks-to-buy) and sales (conversion). It offers a higher likelihood of conversion as compared to using traditional email templates. In other words, it can drive revenue and a loyal customer base by generating more leads from repeat activation rates via customization options.

What are the Benefits of Personalized Images to Your Email Marketing Efforts?

In today’s market, the number one reason why people unsubscribe to an email list is that they can’t stand seeing the same promotional message over and over. It seems that there are just too many emails coming in. If you are looking for a way to avoid this, email personalization is the key.

Personalized images go a long way to capturing subscriber interest by giving their inboxes different and more interesting impressions each time they open your email list. Some of its benefits include the following.

Improve Customer Experience

A personalized image can improve customer experience by providing a more memorable connection to the company. Customers are more likely to remember an image, rather than a long list of 10,000 different options that take up space on a page. Aside from that, it provides a positive first impression. This can be a powerful method for customers to feel positive about your business or product before they have even approached you or interacted with your company.

Increase Engagement Rates

If you want to get the most out of marketing automation, it is essential to keep your subscribers engaged through email personalization. You can take a step further by sending them personalized messages with images to catch their attention. Personalized images ensure that your emails are relevant and interesting to each individual subscriber which will make them more likely to open the email and respond. In turn, these responses lead to a higher engagement rate and revenue generation for your business.

Convert Leads into Customers

Personalized images in marketing, in general, can be beneficial for businesses looking to attract potential customers. By using customized, unique photos with the company’s logo, products, or service-oriented messages, companies are able to express their personality and focus on the needs of individual consumers. This personalized approach encourages consumers to connect with a business in a more personal manner rather than just viewing them as faceless corporations.

Build Brand Loyalty

Customized images are an easy way for companies to build brand loyalty. They can offer their customers a more personal experience through these photos. They allow for more opportunities for engagement with consumers and the photos can often be related to the company’s products or services. Moreover, personalized images have the ability to create more connections between the retailer and their customers which, in the long run, creates stronger brand loyalty.

Drive More Sales

Personalization is an essential ingredient for your revenue growth. This helps you generate 122% ROI for your business. With personalized images, you are letting your customers see your products in a way that they can easily relate to. This can be through sharing an image from their personal life that can be used as an inspiration. Once the customer can relate to what they are seeing, it becomes easier for them to trust the company and its product or services. In addition, a personalized image can make a huge impact on a business. It is proven effective that customized images can drive more sales through increased visibility and higher recall. Through personalization efforts, people can see what you offer and how it will benefit them.

When To Use Personalized Images?

People want to be recognized as individuals. They also want to feel special when they receive a message from a company. This is the reason why personalized images are becoming more and more popular for email marketing campaigns. These are a great way to stand out from the crowd and can make a big difference in your email campaign results. These make a good impression on recipients which leads to better response rates and open rates.

You can include personalized images in the following automated emails.

Welcome Email

A welcome email is essential in your customer’s journey. It is the first email you send to new customers that provides them with important information about your business. It usually includes a logo, a contact name, and contact information. Including a personalized image in your first email is a great way to welcome a new customer in a more personal manner. It allows you also to establish an instant rapport with the customers. On top of that, it is also helpful in building trust between the company and the customers.

When done correctly, you can use this to your advantage. Based on the GetResponse report in 2017,  welcome email has average open rates of 86.03% and a click-through rate of 24.69%.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

An abandoned cart recovery email is an email that is sent to the customers who abandon their shopping cart. Its purpose is to inform the customer about the product that they have left in their shopping cart and how they can return to complete their purchase. This helps increase your conversion rate as it gives a feeling of value to the customer.

Customer Win-back 

A customer win-back email is a personalized email sent to your customers who are not buying from you for a long time but are still part of your contact list. It aims to re-engage customers and encourage them to come back to your website. This is also an effective way to generate revenue if you use it correctly. That is why your email content should be personal and should be sent at the right time.

Cold Outreach

Image personalization helps with cold email outreach by increasing responsiveness from the recipient. By including personalized images in cold emails, your sales team can demonstrate a level of care and interest in the recipient that they are unlikely to see from generic cold emails. This will encourage them to take notice of your message, increasing the likelihood that they will read and respond to your message. Additionally, personalized images can also be used to create visual impact and reinforce branding awareness.

Birthday and Holidays Greetings

Birthday and Holidays Greetings Emails are the best way to make a memorable impression on your customers. These are also effective in building connections with them as these give warmth to the recipients. To make these more special, you can insert personalized images.

Thank You

Thank you email is an email that is sent after the customers have purchased your product or service. This email is used to express your gratitude to them and to give them a personal touch. This allows you to strengthen your customer relationship and improve your sales. A thank you email should be easy to read, and it should be concise and personalized. On top of that, thank you emails are also effective in improving customer satisfaction and increasing the chances of repeat purchases.

Other Use Cases

While dynamic content are mostly used for personalization, you can also use dynamic images for repurposing content such as tweets on Twitter to image posts on Instagram. You can also use dynamic images to give previews to potential buyers on your eCommerce store that sells personalized or customized products. On top of that, you can use custom image along with dynamic text as part of your landing page or website personalization strategy.

Did you know that video personalization is a great way to boost customer engagement? Find out here.

5 Tips in Creating Personalized Images

Personalized images are the future of marketing. They allow you to reach out to your customers and engage them in a meaningful way. Through this marketing strategy, you can add a personal touch to your images and add emotional value to your marketing messages.

However, creating personalized images is not as easy as it seems. There are certain steps you need to follow to make your images more interesting and appealing.

Identify Your Goal

When editing an image, it is helpful for the editors or graphic artists to identify what they want to achieve. For instance, when you want to use personalized images for Birthday and Holidays Greetings, then adding a picture of your products is not a good idea. Instead, you can just add a promo code as your personal gift to your customers.

Gather Customer Data

Having enough data about your customers makes it easier for you to create a personalized image. For example, your super millennial poster may not be pleasing to the eye of your non-millennial customers. On the other hand, a vintage image may be eye-catching to older generations but not to the younger ones. So to be able to capture all your customers’ attention, you need to gather data about them.

Segment Your Audience

After gathering your customer data, the next thing you need to do is to segment them. You can segment your audience based on their demographic profile, transactional behavior, or personal information. In this way, your image personalization technique becomes more effective and can be suitable for everyone’s preferences.

Choose Your Image Personalization Tool

When you are done doing all the first three tips, the next thing you need to do is to choose your editing tool. A reliable image personalization tool is essential in order to make high-quality personalized images. When choosing, you should always get one that is user-friendly yet has powerful features that even a beginner will be able to use. For this, I can recommend tools such as Nexweave, DynaPictures, Lemlist, and SalesBlink—all these tools are discussed below.

Create Your Image

Finally, create your image. It should be an attention-grabbing image so anyone would not resist looking at it. Emphasize important details so your customers will not miss any essential information. When you need to add texts, choose a font color and font style that are not too distracting. A good color combination is also a must. More importantly, do not forget to include your logo. Always… always include your logo so no one can claim the ownership of your hard work except you.

Recommended Image Personalization Tools

As email marketing has become a powerful tool for reaching and engaging your target audience, it is important to make sure that your email campaigns are personalized to increase open rates and conversions. Here’s a list of four image personalization tools you can use to give the best possible experience to your recipients.

Nexweave

Nexweave is both a recommended tool for image and video personalization. It is easy to use even if you are using it for the first time, your output is at quality. It offers powerful features so personalizing an image or video for your email marketing campaigns will never be a problem. And if you don’t want to start from scratch, they have numerous ready-made templates waiting for you. Just link the personalization layers to the right merge tag and once you connect it to Google Sheets via Pabbly Connect, it will start to automatically generate personalized videos and images for you.

DynaPictures 

DynaPictures is a design automation software. It is best used for auto-generating personalized banners and photos for social media and email marketing campaigns. Once you use REST API, you can start designing your templates and changing the colors, texts, and logos. Aside from these, you can use Zapier integration so you can create automated workflows. You can even connect this tool to your Google Docs. If you need help setting it up, they have a detailed knowledge base that goes through every step for you.

SalesBlink

SalesBlink is both an image personalization and cold email outreach tool. When using this software for these two purposes, you can easily find leads effectively and efficiently. You want to start by creating an email template, then insert the merge fields into the images. Once you are able to get important information from your leads, you can send them emails with personalized images for increased reply rates. You can also use UTM tags and track your opens with Google Analytics.

Final Thought

In today’s digital world, personalization is a must for any email marketing campaign. Marketers have been using this tactic to bring relevant content and offer to the right recipients at the right time. In fact, based on the Experian study, personalized emails yield a whopping 6x higher transactional rates than those without any personalization.

Through the help of image personalization, you can deliver better targeted and personalized content to your email subscribers. By doing so, you can create a unique customer experience which is essential in building connection and loyalty.