Boost your email marketing - a simple way to blend email automation with personalisation

Give your newsletter subscribers the ability to personalise their content and put your email marketing on autopilot

Finding the right balance between automating your email marketing and engaging your subscribers is critical. A focus on automation over subscriber value will obviously lead to problems with attrition whereas a focus on personalisation can be time consuming and difficult to manage.

Thankfully, finding this balance might be easier than you think.

Three key benefits of combining email automation and personalisation in your marketing campaigns:

• Increase subscriber engagement — we’ve seen click rates 750% greater than industry average.
• Reduce unsubscribes — more engaged subscribers means less attrition and a faster growing list.
• Happy subscribers — happy subscribers not only interact more with your regular newsletters but become more open to other brand communications. They are also a great source of word of mouth referrals.

How a recruitment company transformed their email marketing by combining email automation with personalisation

A client of ours in the recruitment industry set us this challenge. How could we increase subscriber satisfaction and engagement without increasing the time required to create and send email campaigns?

The recruitment industry is extremely competitive, particularly in the sectors our client works in. They had started to focus on growing their newsletter database and were actively looking for ways to increase the value they offered to their email subscribers.

The solution we implemented has seen their open rates jump to 50% above industry average and their click rate blow industry averages out of the water by more than 750%*.

Before we get into the solution, it’s worth touching on the time required to maintain this on a daily and weekly basis. Zero. Seriously, we were not only able to decrease the time to prepare and send a newsletter, we were able to eliminate it altogether. Beyond the quick set up, this is a fully automated email marketing solution.

Using FlipRSS alongside the client’s existing Campaign Monitor account enabled us to automate multiple RSS feeds based on individual subscriber preferences. FlipRSS works to provide a level of customisation and personalisation that makes automation relevant and personal. The results the client is getting week in week out speak for themselves.

It all focuses on the subscriber. Upon subscription, we gave each subscriber the choice of what they received in their newsletter. We allowed them to personalise the content to suit exactly what they were looking for. In this case, which job categories they were interested in. FlipRSS then enables the client to combine and automate multiple RSS feeds within a single newsletter based on these individual subscriber preferences.

Subscribers only get relevant, timely content they’re interested in. They are more responsive to emails from the client, and most importantly, the lack of irrelevant content has driven click rates through the roof.

The client continues to use their existing email sender, which is Campaign Monitor, and uses FlipRSS to handle the automated RSS to email personalisation and scheduling. FlipRSS also works with Mailchimp, allowing businesses to get all this functionality without having to move email providers or move their data.

The campaigns can be set to run daily, weekly, monthly or any other frequency to suit.

Of course this solution works for many industries and businesses, not just recruitment companies. News websites, real estate agents, educational institutions, bloggers, financial organisations, charities and any business with multiple content categories can all benefit from automating multiple RSS feeds based on subscriber preferences.

Implementing multiple RSS feed to email automation

If you currently have a Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp account to manage your email marketing, the set up is really easy. If you don’t, just set up an account with one the two email service providers we currently support. Then it’s just five simple steps.

1. Sign up to FlipRSS (30 day free trial — no credit card required) and enter your API key for your chosen email service provider
2. Add a small line of code to your newsletter template
3. Set up your Groups within Mailchimp or segments within Campaign Monitor if you haven’t already (You can also use merge tag variables)
4. Configure your FlipRSS settings and add your RSS feeds
5. Set the schedule then sit back and watch your engagement increase

* Industry averages for Recruitment and Staffing taken from Mailchimp’s Benchmark report