Email personalisation has come a long way from the days of simply adding your subscriber's first name at the start of a message. 

Which is why, in this week’s episode, we’re diving into some truly creative and unusual ways to use personalisation to ramp up your conversions. 

Forget the basic, automated-sounding tactics. Today, we’ll explore how to make your emails feel genuinely tailored to your audience, so they stand out in a crowded inbox.

Useful Episode Resources

FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

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If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint

Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

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Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

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00:00.43

emailmarketingheroes

What are some really creative ways and unusual ways of using personalization in your emails to jack up your conversions? That's what I'm gonna talk about in today's show.

00:32.93

emailmarketingheroes

Hello, welcome back to the show. Thanks for joining us again, this email marketing Wednesday. Lovely to have your Kennedy here as ever. I'm actually joined by Ivy, the cat, one of my two Bengal cats. So if you hear her purring in the background, and that's what's going on. She's she's my co-host of the day, only on Ivy. lovely Anyway, today we are talking about ways to personalize your emails. And the reason you want to do that is according to the really clever bots who do all the clever research and stuff, when you personalize emails, personalization basically is one of the big levers, one of the big factors that significantly ramps up conversion rate. and And it makes sense, like when someone feels like something is personal to them, it's more relevant to them.

01:13.08

emailmarketingheroes

therefore it gets more of their attention, and therefore they feel like, oh, well, if it's personal to me, this person understands me, therefore must be able to solve my problem, which is all the good stuff that people want when they want to follow about to buy something, right? It's all about this person understands me, therefore they can solve my problem. so And I've got some really unusual creative ways that I use to add personalization into my email campaigns. I think you're gonna really, really get a kick out of today. um And by the way,

01:41.40

emailmarketingheroes

If you're a brand new to the show and you've just tuned in, hello, welcome. Hello, I'm Kennedy. It's nice to have you here with me and with all of us and with Ivy as well. He was currently clawing at my leg and it's really fucking painful actually. can you put your claws away like um and And if you haven't already hit subscribe on your podcast player, that just means you don't miss out on an episode.

02:00.38

emailmarketingheroes

And by the way, I would love it if you would leave a review of the show over on Apple Podcast because that helps more people to discover this show and get all of this good information to help them with their email marketing. I think that'd be a really good thing to do. So that all said.

02:17.97

emailmarketingheroes

let's Let's get into it. And yeah, we're talking about ah all about increasing those conversions by by using some personalization. And here's what most people do when they think of personalization. They think, well, I'm grabbing their name and email address when they join my email list. So I guess I'll put, hi, first name at the beginning of the email. That's personalization. The problem is people are sort of blind to that now. I mean, I'll tell you a little little story.

02:44.99

emailmarketingheroes

When I first joined the email list of legendary marketer, Dan Kennedy, back in the day, um, I got an email from Dan and it said, hi, Kennedy. I was like, Oh fuck, like he's actually emailed me. That's really cool. So I replied, I was like, Hey, Dan. And of course I found out not that long later that he wasn't email me emailing me at all. He had a way of putting my name into.

03:10.23

emailmarketingheroes

Uh, into the email. So, you know, that was, that was more than 20 years ago. So I'm sure I can forgive myself. It's a little bit too killing and embarrassing. I think that happened. That's pretty pretty funny. Anyway, I'm going to go beyond that. In fact, what I would say is because people are so savvy to that and so wise to that exposed to it, they've seen a lot. I would say when someone joins your email list.

03:31.48

emailmarketingheroes

don't use their name in the first few emails because that looks like it's basically it's completely invisible at that point because they know it's completely automated people know it's automated anyway but like we're not trying to trick anybody here but it really isn't serving any purpose so I would generally not use that name the only exception would be is if they're entering like a contest you want to say hey congrats first name make a bit more of a song and dance a bit but if it's just like the greeting line of a sort of very plain looking email I would just not bother because it's not really adding anything to it but then when you use it later it has actually a little bit more of an effect which is great but we're really not here to talk about just using the name

04:09.65

emailmarketingheroes

although you can use the name in some more creative ways. In fact, yeah, I'll share them with you before we even get into the really creative stuff. So rather than just being like, hey, first name, one of the things I like to do is put their name mid-sentence. So I'll think of a sentence like, um what if I could do this for your business, for example? What if I could do this for your lawn? What if I could do this for your ah your teeth? What if I could do this for your child's education? Whatever. um And instead of your,

04:38.94

emailmarketingheroes

um you could put something like, hey, I was wondering to myself, what if I could do this for first names, family? What if I could do this for first names, business? ah So does that make sense? So you' you've kind of got, you're using it in a much more creative way. That's a mid-sentence. It actually becomes personalization because it's part of a story, a part of a thought. So that's one more slightly creative ah way The other way i like to do i like to think I like to do it, and i've ah I've applied this before, is to say the phrase, um it's like, and then I ask myself, what would first name do? So, what would Mike do? What would Sarah do? What would you know first name do? um Would this work for Jeff's business? Would this work for

05:27.69

emailmarketingheroes

um first names lawn okay so using their name in a creative way okay after this will be absolutely the perfect solution for first names situation first names um you know asthma or whatever it's going to be okay so using people's names in that way But then you can take us to the next level. now Now we're going to start getting a bit more creative. And that is if you click first name and last name, which I'm seeing more and more people do these days on forms. And remember, when you collect in this data, it doesn't all have to be at once. It could be like a two step, like they you give you their first name and. um

06:07.17

emailmarketingheroes

email the address on on the opt-in form. And on the next page, like, hey, also, what's your, and then you collect another piece of information or two. Or it could be that you collect some of this information only once they've bought something. So once people buy something, you might also collect a phone number or ah or some of the other information that we're going to talk about today. So you don't all you don't want to end up with your signup form as being hugely long, although adding a few more fields to your signup form will increase the quality of the people that you're getting on your list. So that's a thing to think about. I know we talked about that in a past episode that I had my friend Kate Jeffries on talking about all of that kind of stuff. When did we have Kate on? Oh, sorry, Kate McKibben. I always forget which name she uses.

06:49.00

emailmarketingheroes

Kate McKibbin, back on ah episode 246. Definitely worth listening to that when she talked about adding extra form fields to your to your forms and and how she uses that. It's very, very interesting for some segmentation stuff. Very cool. Anyway, back to back to using things creative. So what you could do is collect their surname as well, their last name.

07:07.45

emailmarketingheroes

And what's really cool about that is you can, ah you can really spice up some emails. You can be like, um, so if you were in the, in, in any niche, really, you can use this, but like, imagine if I'm doing an email about how to, you know, how to make extra sales with your business, you could have an email that was like, if you know that you, your audience is married men, right?

07:31.32

emailmarketingheroes

So if your audience was married men and in in general, you know, married men and you're helping them grow an online business. Let's just say that as an example to to apply this to, right? What you could have ah an email that contained, you could say, you could say something like, can you imagine what misses their surname, their last name would say?

07:52.49

emailmarketingheroes

So imagine the person on your email list is called John Smith. Can you imagine what Mrs. Smith would say if you brought home an extra blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? So you're no longer making it about them, like them individually. You're making it about their partner. I've seen somebody else do this where they talked about a parent and they were like, um you know, something to do with like, does this run in the surname family?

08:21.87

emailmarketingheroes

right Does this work run in the last name family? Does success run in the Smith family? Can you see how that totally stands out? It's way more creative. And when you when somebody stands out, you might think, oh, well, that's only novel. It's novel, but novel is the thing that grabs attention. Look, the beginning of all those ads you see on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook,

08:44.41

emailmarketingheroes

they open up with a novel hook, you know, there's a guy juggling something or spinning a plate or dropping something or pouring, um you know, water off in all these crazy things, just as these, these attention hooks at the beginning. That's what we're doing here. So can you imagine if you said, does success run in the surname last name family? Or does you know whatever you know, whatever it is that, you know, do do all people in the blank family have awful lawns? You know, like, um is asthma a last name family trait?

09:22.00

emailmarketingheroes

Right? So really cool ways of using it, right? The next thing you could do is you could find out the name of their product. So ah as part of your onboarding, maybe even for a free thing, imagine having like an onboarding survey when someone downloads your free item. Hey, I want to understand a bit more about you so we can personalize your experience. yeah and We call it an alpha survey. That's the way we do we call we call it. But a little and find out the name of their main product.

09:49.38

emailmarketingheroes

So now, when you find out the name of their product, a few days or weeks later, you can have an email that goes out that says, here's the master plan to ah to double the sales of name of product, right? If you're in the B2B niche, have a boot or sell product. um One of the ones that we've had for years now, because I want i think it'll be a cool email, I said, why don't we add this form, which was, we ask people which email marketing platform they use.

10:18.24

emailmarketingheroes

And the only reason, well, there's two things we can do with that. One is we get in a bit of ah a picture of the landscape of what our market, our audience, our subscribers are actually using, whether they're using Keep or ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit, I should say, or Kit, I was like i guess it's called now, um or HighLevel, what are they using?

10:38.18

emailmarketingheroes

um That's useful to know so we can tailor our messaging to that level of person and use the terms that that platform uses in our in our training and in our marketing. But even more so, that's that's a side effect for me. The thing I really wanted to do was just collect my data for this one subject line.

10:54.21

emailmarketingheroes

right I wanted to be able to send this email and this is and its um please today because it's bloody effective. The subject line is, are you wasting your platform name subscription? So imagine whatever your platform, so imagine somebody who's got um high level, they will get the email that says, Are you wasting your high level subscription? And then somebody else who using kit, are you wasting your kit subscription? Are you wasting your keep subscription? Like that is really powerful because it is personalized. And then in the email, if you're like, Hey, we find a lot of people who are using ah convert kit, you know, the name of that platform, are have all the best intention, it's got great, this has got great that but they've got this problem.

11:36.46

emailmarketingheroes

we can solve that problem. So just by collecting that effort information. The other thing you can ask is is and and include is who they help. So um who does your audience actually help? Who do they who do they serve? okay So again, if you're in B2B, that's a really good ah really good thing to do if you're helping other businesses. So if you know that that business helps people who um who can't cook, for example, and they want to learn recipes and really nice recipes that We've got one client who helps people make really lovely meals, even though they're an absolute amateur chef. right They usually eat pot noodles. And so you know can you imagine like um if they help um Rubbish Cooks? Let's say that's how they express it, right? um Imagine if you could send an email that says, hey, here's a great way to get more Rubbish Cooks to buy your program.

12:27.72

emailmarketingheroes

Okay? But here's some other things you can do, which don't involve collecting any more data. Because the things I've just mentioned are like, you have to add more fields, you have to ask more questions of your people, which is a good thing to do, by the way. Like every time we have somebody take a new action, we try and put at least one additional question somewhere among that.

12:48.41

emailmarketingheroes

And sometimes that ah additional question might be part of an order form, so it might grab their ah their city, for example, from the order form. right Which brings me on to this, which is, even if you're not collecting through ah the form their location, their town, city, state or country, often when somebody submits a form,

13:08.89

emailmarketingheroes

your your system, based on their IP address, we know that location you will Your system will know their town city, you know a nearest city, something like that, a nearest town, which is cool. And you can use it, right? You could use it for something like, imagine you, um imagine you're I'm gonna go with that lawn company again. The reason I'm talking about lawn companies is because we just we're we're having a company come around next week to come and assess our lawn, because it's it's mostly weeds, not very much lawn. We don't have very much lawn. We don't have a very big house.

13:38.64

emailmarketingheroes

But it's um it it's fucking annoying me. So um that's why lawns are on my mind. Lawns are on my mind. There's a song for everything just in case you didn't know. I am that guy. So imagine you know someone's location here in the lawn care business.

13:54.92

emailmarketingheroes

Well, imagine there is also going to be some kind of lots of rain, which is very common here in the Northeast of England. We've had bully loads of it recently. So you could send an email out, which is like warning city that they're in. So Newcastle residents from your lawn company. Okay. So now I'm getting on like warning Newcastle residents. Oh my gosh.

14:20.19

emailmarketingheroes

You know, what, what am I going to, what's going to be in that? Okay. Um, so there's another one. Also imagine if you knew their lead source. So where was that lead? Where did you get that lead from? Where did that subscriber come from? So imagine you've got a custom field. You've got a field inside of your, um, inside of your email system, which has in it where that kind person came from. Did they come from Instagram, Tik TOK? Did they come from your Facebook group ah from Facebook? Did they come from a training you gave for, you know, that person?

14:50.76

emailmarketingheroes

Um, so what, imagine you have, um, some people who you've obviously on you on your email list, who you've got from different places. You've got one person who came from, I did a training for a rich chef run. I've done a few of them now for his, his programs. So I've got one person who in that custom field says rich chef run. I've got another po person who says Facebook, another person who says Instagram. I can send an email that says, Hey, since we met through.

15:16.46

emailmarketingheroes

Source, Richefran, since we met through Facebook, since we met through TikTok, I thought that, but up up but but what's happening there? Is you're reminding them where you met and it's super, super personalised.

15:33.28

emailmarketingheroes

And if you're already collecting you know using UTMs, using um you know you're using tracking, if you're already collecting collecting the the source of those leads, that is a great bit of personalization you could use in creative ways. And here's one final one.

15:50.29

emailmarketingheroes

which is really cool is you could, this is using fields which are built into your system. So many of the systems will be able to merge in things like the month, like this month right now. So like it will be able to merge in, you know, October, or it will be able to merge in the day of the week. I like this one the best. Monday, Tuesday, the day of the week that the email is sent, even though it's an automation,

16:17.04

emailmarketingheroes

And that's when these things really come into their own and really are powerful is when you use them in automations because it really resets the attention of, oh, I'm in an automation. If somebody is wise to that or the email sort of feel very like they were written a while ago, not because of anything referential, but just they they have that vibe, a really good way of making them feel current.

16:39.00

emailmarketingheroes

is by having a merge field in of something that is timely. So imagine if at the beginning of one of your automated emails, like you've written once, people are joining it at any day of the week, but on that day it says, it starts off with, hey, happy Wednesday. I was just thinking, what does that do? It makes it more personal. It makes it like, the oh, it's Wednesday. They're saying happy Wednesday.

17:04.99

emailmarketingheroes

it makes it feel like this is happening now. And when we make feel but better people feel like something's happening now in a moment, that creates an implicit urgency of attention rather than going, oh, I could read that at any point. When we say it's Wednesday, it's October, it's, ah you know, ah yeah you could, I mean, heck, if you really want to, I've never done the one I'm about to say, I've done everything else we just talked about.

17:29.26

emailmarketingheroes

But you could even, at the top of your emails, maybe at the top right, merge in today's date. You know, a bit like, I've seen people do it back in the day where they, like, would put the date in the emails and they can say, you know, the email for that date. That makes it look like it's happening now. So there's a whole bunch of ways you can use information that you collect and information that you're not asking for, but you're by default collecting.

17:55.06

emailmarketingheroes

and then using some systematic things like days of the week and other things you can merge in to actually create massive levels and and an amazing creative levels of personalization that stand out, get people's attention and make them feel really really good. I'm really really curious which one of these is your biggest takeaway. In fact, find me on Instagram at email marketing heroes and just put a ah story up and let me know which of these things that you think was the most was the most fun one, one that you might want to use, which one's really standing out to you at email marketing heroes over on the Instagram machine.

18:32.88

emailmarketingheroes

And if you're not already inside of our free Facebook group, by the way, come and hang out. Don't be left alone. Just thinking about all this email marketing stuff and how you apply it to your business. Definitely go i go and find the email marketing show community over on Facebook. It is completely free. you Just go to Facebook, search for the email marketing show community. It will pop up request to join. It's completely free. And I'm in there all the time, chatting all things email marketing. It's amazing. Cool. Right now I'm going to go for this week's

19:03.03

emailmarketingheroes

Sorry, there's a little delay on me clicking that button there, I apologize, that was very amateurish. So here's my subject line on the week, and it's just the number three, and then the word times, three times.

19:14.49

emailmarketingheroes

And this works really well is because people don't know any, like it has so little context and it's a really short email subject line. The subject line is really short, the number three than the word times. Like it's it's only like a few characters long, what was it? Two, four, five, six, seven characters long, including the space. Very short stands out, but they wanna know what the three times is. Have you said something three times? Have you done something three times? and What do you want three times what? Like it's got so much curiosity.

19:44.46

emailmarketingheroes

Now, what it was actually about was the fact I went to see um the the new version of the Beetlejuice movie, which is called Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. And loved it, by the way. Loved it. Thought it was great. If you've not seen it, it'll be I'm sure it'll be out on something to watch right now.

19:59.45

emailmarketingheroes

And and it it was great. and And I ended up talking about the fact that I wish someone could just say my name three times and I'd appear right there with that in their business to help them out. That was the the the whole concept of it. um So again, that what that that subject line was three times. Look, I hope you've enjoyed the show this week. I've really enjoyed sharing this stuff with you. All these creative ways of personalizing things. If you haven't already, make sure you hit subscribe on the podcast player and leave me a review on the Apple Podcasts. That would be amazing if you would. It just helps more people discover the show and that would really help a lot more people. Appreciate you. I'll be back next week. See you then.