Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: Have you thought of personalizing your emails according to the two sexes?

Targeted mailings: Why should you split your mailing lists and campaigns between the sexes, and what role does the difference between men and women play in email marketing?

Each and every marketer knows that each recipient is unique in his or her personality, likes, dislikes, habits, etc.  This is why it is important to interact with each recipient on a personal level.  Since we don’t have all the time in the world, it isn’t possible to personalize every campaign to each individual, however there are many personalizations that are possible in order to appeal directly to the recipient.

You can split your recipients into different groups according to age, city of residence, profession and interests, to name a few. There is no doubt that the most substantial personalization that you can make is between men and women. Although splitting your mailing lists according to sex is a simple task, it becomes more complicated when actually writing and designing your digital marketing content.

This is how to personalize between men and women in your mailings:

personalize men and women in emarketing

Head vs. Heart

Public opinion is that women are more sensitive than men, and physiology seems to back this up. The size of the prefrontal cortex is positively correlated with emotional levels, and it turns out that, on average, women have a larger prefrontal cortex than males have.

As marketers, it is in your best interest to implement this information in your email marketing strategies. For instance, you can easily personalize the subject line of your newsletters to each of the sexes, pulling on women’s heartstrings with a subject line along the lines of: “With ### diapers, your child will thank you each and every day.” On the other hand, you can send a more logistical subject line to the men, such as: “90% of customers prefer ### diapers over the competitors.”

Here’s an example of a subject line that would work well with the male sex:

improve your newsletter results

When brainstorming on subject lines, think about how your product or service conjures up emotion, and implement that idea into the women’s mailings. When writing the men’s subject lines, take the opposite path and sell the practicality of your product.

Pay attention to this: The Most Common Mistakes Online Marketers Make and How to Fix Them by ActiveTrail’s Pros

 Pictures vs. Text

Wondering how to present your newsletter content? The following points should help:

  • According to a few studies, men enjoy the more humoristic side of things while women gravitate toward lifestyle content, such as pictures of a beautiful view.
  • Men have sharper spatial perspective due to the size of their parietal lobe, therefore it is likely that pictures will catch their attention and hopefully lead them to click through.
  • Women, on the other hand, respond much better to content that will shed light on your product, especially customer testimonials. Women are 67% more likely to purchase a product after reading reviews.

Know when to send out your newsletters

The best way to discover the optimal hour is, and always will be, to test it out for yourself. If practice makes us perfect, testing makes us knowledgeable! Each community is different from the next, therefore you must figure out for yourself what is most efficient among your recipients – that’s where AB Testing comes in. With it you can send out the same newsletter at different times to small groups of recipients, and subsequently analyze the results in order to figure out which hour yields the best response.

Although conducting the tests is still important, it might help to know that according to research conducted by SimpleRelevance, men are more likely to delve into their unread emails during the earlier hours (9:00am – 4:00 pm), while women tend to check their email throughout the entire day (10:00am – 21:00pm).

So what is the best time to send out mail?

Working under pressure – it’s not for everyone

Sometimes, in this fast-paced world we live in, you have to use a sense of urgency in order to receive your recipients’ undivided attention. It turns out, however, that this doesn’t work on everyone. While the subject line “Hurry before it ends!” and subject lines alike, may seem like a great way to turn your recipients heads, the world of medicine has proved that women do not respond well to this urgency.

Cortisol, a hormone that is released in response to stress, produces a negative effect among women since it remains in their system longer than it does in men’s, prolonging feelings of pressure. Unless you want to stress out your female community, you might want to stick with a more relaxed approach.

What about the sender’s sex?

Since we are on the topic of gender issues, it is both interesting and helpful to know about the research that CleverTouch conducted on open rates. They checked the open rates among 13 million recipients and found that campaigns sent by women conjured open rates of 18% while campaigns sent by men averaged an open rate of a measly 10%.

newsletter sender gender

Here at ActiveTrail we decided to grab the bull by its horns and test the issue ourselves. An AB Testing campaign was sent to about 1,600 recipients. Campaign A and campaign B contained the same exact content and were sent to the same number of recipients. The only difference was that campaign A was sent by a female member of our team, her name appearing as the sender and campaign B was sent by a male member of our team.

Campaign A, sent by a woman, received an open rate of a whopping 30% while campaign B raked in only 15%. This difference is too drastic to be considered a coincidence, and teaches a lesson that needs to be taken into consideration in email marketing tactics.

Create dynamic and targeted groups with ActiveTrail and analyze the aspects of your campaign that influence their success. Our system offers a wide variety of tools that will ensure a permanent increase in your open rates, and you should be taking advantage of them.

 

Learn More: Eager to Send Out a Newsletter but Don’t Know About What? Here Are a Few Ideas