Monday, 24 June 2013

Even Groupon Can Get It Wrong

Posted by Unknown at 10:51 am Labels: , , , , , , ,
A lot of us use personalisation as it is a great way to connect with your subscribers and if it is performed effectively you may not even notice it is being used. Often people think “personalisation” can only be used for data such as the subscribers first name so when you are sending your email it will state “Dear Jake”. Although having the subscribers first name is a good place to start, it can actually be used for much more than that.

 A great way to let your subscribers know you are sending them targeted and useful emails is by using the data you have such as location or last purchase. If you use that data as personalisation you can tell the subscriber you are sending them an email because they are in a particular location or because they have recently purchased a particular product.

 So the benefits to adding personalisation into your email are clear, however the mistakes that can come from using it if it is not added correctly or you do not have the data to display can affect your whole email. Even some big companies can use personalisation incorrectly, for example let's look at Groupon’s recent email:


As you can see highlighted above the “Discount” is showing as “-%” so the recipient doesn’t actually know how much discount they will be getting. Due to this they are immediately losing the initial enticement for the recipient to “view it”. As the personalisation is not working the recipient cannot know how much discount they would get.

The full email can be viewed here: http://news.groupon.co.uk/c/mv?EMID=08A02SK4O57QB05H9L300MBIUGC&TYPE=HTML

So even the big senders can get it wrong, but here at GraphicMail we make sure you don’t! Not only do we offer up to 50 free test sends a day but we also allow you to view the personalisation working within the account.

To see it working click on Advanced Mail (tab at the top)  >> Send (tab on the left) >> Preview, within the preview you can then select the mailing list you are sending to and the newsletter you would like to view.  

 As you can see below within the preview you can then view the “Firstname” and “Location” personalisation working correctly.


Although that is a great start we also help you further; if you do not have data for all of your subscribers such as you do not have all of the subscribers ‘first names’ then don’t worry. You can add a default value into the dataset, by doing so if the email is sent to a subscriber that has not given their first name then the default value will be displayed such as “Dear Subscriber”. By adding the default value it will make sure you don't have any missing text.

It can easily be added by clicking on "Advanced Mail" (tab at the top) >> "Datasets" (tab on the left) >> "Modify Datasets" >> You can then add a default value within the "Default Value" column on the right as shown below:

As you can see we offer lots of fall back solutions to ensure the issue displayed with Groupon's email doesn't happen to you. Make sure you test your emails thoroughly before you send out because once it is sent there is no going back.

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