Five Personalization Tips that Would Make any Email Marketer’s Mother Proud

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In our first Mother’s Day article, we highlighted U.K. retailer Marks & Spencer’s recent success using real-time personalization strategies in its Mother’s Day emails and landing pages. These included the use of countdown timers to create shopping urgency and geotargeted maps to help consumers find the closest store to shop.

In our second Mother’s Day article, we want to offer five additional tips you can use to create engaging, memorable emails for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or any holiday.  

Don’t miss your chance

According to the NRF, Mother’s Day was the fourth biggest consumer shopping event in 2018, trailing only “Back to School,” “Back to College,” and “Winter Holidays.” After looking at the results from holidays that have occurred in 2019, it looks like this trend will continue.

In this way, Mother’s Day represents a blessing and a curse. On one hand, these numbers are proof that shoppers are spending, and hopefully from you. But if they’re not, it means you must rise above your competitors to capture their attention.

To help, here are five ways any email marketer can use real-time personalization to create highly engaging, highly relevant, and highly effective Mother’s Day emails.

Tip #1. Engage your audience with a poll

Last year, grocery giant Kroger created a fun Mother’s Day email that offered casual, catchy call-to-action buttons, such as “Get toasty” to promote a new salmon toast recipe and “Let’s get crackin’” in reference to an egg-inspired brunch.

Such an approach helped differentiate Kroger’s marketing, but the brand really took it up a notch by adding an interactive poll to its campaign. In this case, the email creative asked readers a specific question: “What are you getting Mom this year?” The email included one-click options such as flowers, chocolate, gift cards, and beauty products, and Liveclicker’s LivePoll advanced personalization experience actually displayed the responses in real time.

This experience connected with shoppers in new ways. Not only could they see how they measured against other poll responses, but they got valuable shopping ideas to make Mother’s Day truly special. Fun!

Tip #2. Create a video

The idea of embedding videos into emails has always had a bad rap in email marketing, even though it’s it’s easier than you might think. It’s also extremely effective: Research shows that those brands that use video in emails experience open rate increases of 19% and click-through rate increases of 50% or more.

Get creative with video! Imagine the appeal of a Mother’s Day email featuring a video that celebrates all that mothers do or promotes a special Mother’s Day event at one of your stores or locations. No one else is doing this today, which makes it the perfect opportunity to cut through the marketing clutter and noise.

If you’d like to learn how three leading brands transformed traditional emails with embedded video, you can read their stories here.

Tip #3. Encourage shopping with loyalty balances

If your company uses loyalty programs, consider personalizing emails by displaying account balances in the email itself. You can be even more creative by showing them how many more steps they need to hit a certain threshold, or what these points could get them today—two tactics that subtly promote spending.

You can even animate their account balances using our LiveRender advanced email experience. This becomes an effective way to show customers how far they’ve come—and how much they can gain. Specific tangible rewards are always much more attractive to consumers.

Tip #4: Put it on their calendar

Just this week, someone asked me, “When is Mother’s Day this year?” It shows you how this day tends to sneak up on is, especially for shoppers already overwhelmed with school, kids’ sports, and so many other activities that consume our time.

Innovative marketing teams can communicate this using personalization capabilities that count down to Mother’s Day or put a reminder on their calendar. For example, you could let shoppers know the absolute last day they can order a gift and still get it delivered in time.  

Tip #5: Use the weather to your advantage

We recently wrote an article that showed how LG is using pollen counts—yes, pollen counts—to promote its line of air filters, washers, and other products.

This is possible with a real-time personalization capability that offers local weather forecasts within the email itself. Using this information, companies with outdoor products and services could offer a last-minute email to get them to attend. Similarly, if the weather is bad, other companies, such as restaurants, stores, museums, or theaters, and more, may consider sending an email to get people to come inside.

Whatever you do, make it memorable

This Mother’s Day, make the most of the moment by engaging your audience with personalized content and surprising new email experiences. When you think about it, such an approach really represents all of us “trying our best,” an outcome any mother would appreciate!

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