How to Use Personalization to Drive Email List Growth

This post is written by Dan Scudder, VP Business Development at Privy. Privy helps businesses more rapidly grow their email list.

Growing an email list is one of the foundations of effective, long-term digital marketing. Email lists allow you to remarket to your audience on-demand and cost effectively. You can also use email lists to gain greater customer insight with companies like TowerData, serve targeted display ads on channels like Facebook and Twitter and drive social sharing of your content and brand.

At Privy, we’ve found that, to encourage people to join your email list, you can be up to three times more effective when you personalize based on website content, geography and visitor behavior. What does it mean to personalize effectively?

Here are a few examples:

Offer different list signup incentives for different pages of your website. No two pages on your website are the same, and often the reason people visit different sections of your site is due to specific interests. If you tailor a list signup offer by URL, you can increase the rate of signups.

For example, if you are an eCommerce merchant selling furniture, you may want to add a sign-up pop-up that encourages email sign-up in return for discounts on sofas – but featured only on the sofa section of your site.

Geotarget list signup offers. Personalize content based on where the visitor is located. People’s behaviors and personas vary greatly depending on where they live.

For example, in the winter, people in Boston are buried under several feet of snow. Whereas, in Florida, it’s warm and sunny. When a person visits your site from Boston, you should show them an email signup pop-up that is more relevant, such as “Dig out from the snow with our newsletter and coupon.” And the visitors from Florida can see something entirely different, and more relevant to their locale.

Leverage repeat visitor data. If a person is repeatedly coming to your website, but not signing up for your email list, show them something new instead of the same old pop-up that they’ve steadily been closing out of. Try a different image or headline. Or, try a different way to display the pop-up (such as exit intent only). Personalizing the experience for a visitor based on customer behavior will increase the rate of list growth and also improve the overall website experience.

A little bit of personalization goes a long way in driving email list growth. Make an effort to understand how your audience engages with your email sign-up pop-ups and landing pages to drive more relevant messaging. Use data to be fun, engaging and intelligent, and the results will speak for themselves.

Effective personalization depends on clean and updated data. How clean is your database? Start your free email validation test today.