The average person receives more than 100 emails a day. Which ones are you opening? Chances are, friends, family & mailing lists that have proven themselves to have relevant content for you are at the top of the list.

But how does a list you’ve subscribed to prove itself to actually be useful? How do you keep prospects interested enough to continue opening the emails & avoid hitting the dreaded “unsubscribe” button?

The key is to acknowledge that your customers are more to you than just a bunch of names on a list.

Personalized email marketing has the opportunity to be something more than just using a merge field that automatically inserts your subscriber’s first name. Of course, using someone’s first name alone has been shown to increase email open rates, but there’s more to it than that.

Email can also be personalized using segmentation, dynamic content & other insights that come from investigating their previous purchasing behavior.

Obviously, a big bonus of using automated email marketing is that it literally saves you hours of having to write copy & send the same emails to the same people over & over again, taking valuable time away from actually being able to grow your business.

But when you are able to pair your convenient email automation with a strategy that pinpoints where your prospect is at & meets them there, you’re able to really accomplish something.

And for the Chicago Music Exchange, one of the city’s longest-running stores for musicians, a personalized email marketing strategy that streamlined their mailing process while creating a unique experience for each shopper paid off bigtime.

The Personalized Email Strategy That Got Them Closer To Customers While Still Saving Time

The Chicago Music Exchange is passionate about connecting with local musicians & meeting their needs. They’re renowned for their personal connections with customers, in-depth expertise & complete passion for what they do.

CME’s mission is simple: to provide musicians with the highest quality selection of guitars, drums, amplifiers, accessories, sound equipment & much more, with supreme service & authority.

All of the store’s team members are trained to pay impeccable attention to details. No question or need involving gear, equipment or instruments is too obscure or too complicated for this squad of experts.

At first, CME was simply running basic email campaigns to send updates to customers. However, they quickly realized that there was more to email marketing than they were taking advantage of.

They needed a more robust strategy & software to provide the same personal experience the store is known for in their online interactions with customers.

So they switched to ActiveCampaign, the same email marketing software Cirius Marketing has used to manage email campaigns.

CME believes that musicians are an extremely individualized breed. No two guitarists use the same combination of equipment or like the same brands.

Therefore, it was crucial for them to use personalized email marketing to recommend & give information about products tailored to each buyers’ preference.

For a store as popular as CME, this might sound like a nightmare. But ActiveCampaign provided them with in-depth analysis into the habits of their customers & tools to craft campaigns that could provide as close to a one on one experience as email can get.

Breaking Down The Strategy

At CME’s website, a visitor becomes a lead when they sign up for the store newsletter, which delivers exclusive information about special promotions & sales.

The business then uses site tracking to get an idea of what they’ve been browsing & what products drive their interests. This also gives the sales team ultra specific insights into the customer’s interests.

This is where the personalized email marketing journey of the customer really begins.

After signing up for the newsletter, these new leads enter a Welcome Series, a series of regular emails that educates them on what CME is all about & shows off what makes them unique.

The objective of the series is to help the leads bond with the brand & get an idea of where their needs fit in. All the emails give them actions to take to explore special promotions & exclusive offers & view different products.

At the end of the series, CME uses list segmentation to put the leads into groups according to their interests, engagement & activity within the emails & on the website.

List segmentation is an easy way to tweak the content of your emails & send them to buyers with specific interests. Rather than getting generalized emails that are written for all customers, each group receives personalized email marketing that addresses particular products & needs based on their previous behavior.

After the segmentation process, leads begin receiving emails with content like videos or details about products that relate to their interests.

The Results Are In…

Within 3 months after implementing this new strategy, CME saw a 15% increase in average open rate compared to their previous strategy.

Their personalized email marketing played a number of roles for customers. For one thing, it took CME’s well-known customer service & successfully moved it online, making every message tailored to their specific needs.

So CME took it a step further. In addition to sending out details about products each customer might be interested in, they started sending email reminders for each customer related to different aspects of servicing their instruments.

For example, a guitarist might get an email reminder that it’s time to buy new guitar strings. A drummer might receive an email telling them they need to replace their drumheads.

These short reminders not only get customers back in the store to make another purchase—they show that CME genuinely cares about their customers’ needs.

For CME, playing music is personal. And using automated email doesn’t mean they have to sacrifice the individual attention they give their customers.

How Do I Make It Happen?

Hopefully, the success of CME has given you some ideas about how to personalize your own email marketing—& create a better Value Journey.

You may not own a music store, but the beauty of automated email is that it can be tailored to fit any industry.

Curious about how to do it? We’d love to talk. Shoot an email to hello@ciriusmarketing.com or call 855-607-7766 with any questions.