This is a guest contribution from Bill Acholla of Billacholla.com.

Max E. Mailer is an email marketer.

Every day, Mailer would send hundreds of emails to carefully cultivated leads. Every day, he’d be disappointed by the lack of response to those emails on which he worked so hard.

What was the problem? Why wasn’t he managing to capture people’s attention?

Then, one fateful day, he did something new. He crafted a passionate email which was too precious to just throw out to some random people. He addressed each and every lead by their first name. He personalized the emails. Sales increased drastically. His company began to get noticed. And his life was never the same again.

Mailer’s problem is one that many of us encounter. But his solution is not what most of us go for. Let’s consider what the data suggests. According to a report, a staggering 94 percent of businesses say personalization is critical for their business. But, according to another report, only 5 percent of companies personalize extensively. 

Personalization works. And it makes sense too. Why would anyone be interested in seeing your email, no matter how crafted it is, if it doesn’t address them? None of us is Hillary Clinton except, of course, Hillary herself. The nation is not holding its breath to read our emails. This is why we personalize. But how do we do that exactly? That is the question.

Here Are The 6 Best Non-Obvious Email Personalization Techniques.

1. No Catch Free Stuff

Who doesn’t like receiving stuff for free? Granted, your organization is a business, not a charity. You are hoping to gain profit on its content, products, or services, not to distribute them for free. But this is a bitter pill you need to swallow to get your message out there.

“Compelling ideas and stories must reach a tipping point before they start to gain momentum. And the best way to push them over the edge is to be generous,” says Jeff Goins. “Giving away your work will allow future customers (or readers or fans or whatever) the opportunity to hear about it, see the value, and then reward you for it.”

Remember, your marketing emails need to provide value to the customer. No one deserves to spend their precious time reading your email without getting something out of it.

Here’s an example of a clever free stuff marketing strategy:

2. Sending Oops Email

If you are a content or product marketer, you would know that mistakes happen. To err is human. If such a thing occurs, don’t worry. Don’t panic. It’s not the end of the world. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It’s an opportunity to connect with your customers or readers.

The best way to do that is to send oops email.

Sounds nice, but what exactly is an oops email? An oops email is when you send an email to your customer to apologize for some earlier mishap.

Whether your website crashed or you sent a wrong email earlier, oops email is the way to go. Just remember to use crafty subject lines to get better open rates.

Give the customers a chance to exonerate you and move on. To forgive is divine. And how can the customers not forgive you if you send an oops email like Urban Outfitters did?

3. Sending Alert Emails

A triggered email alert program can do wonders in terms of attracting customer attention. It’s a smart marketing strategy as well. Not only is it marketing your content, product, or service, it’s also providing value to the customer by keeping them updated about the kind of stuff they’re interested in.

Automated, yet personalized, email alerts are a cheap and effective means of staying in touch with your customers. You can use any of the available email personalization software without even budgeting $1000 for content marketing.

Here’s an example of an email alert sign up form:

4. Giving Subscribers New Content Before Anyone Else

When the customers subscribe, they’re doing you a favor. Remember that. And remember to pay them back for those favors. But how do you that?

One simple way to make your subscribers feel special is to offer them exclusive content before you offer it to anyone else.

This gives your subscribers a sense of exclusivity, a feeling of being in a club, being unique, being different from everyone else. According to Laura C. George, “this is a strategy that gets you email signups and, if you continue to do it well, makes them stick around.”

To give you a better idea of how to make the email recipients feel exclusive, here is one from Brian Dean of Backlinko:

5. Letting Subscribers Control How Often They Hear From You

When it comes to email marketing, there’s a fine line between being consistently repetitive enough to let your message sink in and being annoying enough to turn your customers off or lose them entirely.

So, as a marketer, it’s your responsibility to control how often your customers hear from you.

In your email preferences, include a frequency option. Make it easy for the customers to unsubscribe from your emails, but also consider this: There’s a whole lot of ground to cover between sending 10 emails a day to a customer and letting them unsubscribe.

These two are opposite ends of the spectrum. Frequency preferences are what lie in between. They give the customer a flexible range of options to choose from. Used effectively, these can also act as one of the many email marketing metrics to assess your marketing strategy.

Bonobos does it in a clever way:

6. Segmenting Which Type Of Content They Get From You

“If content is king, segmentation is queen,” says Paralee Walls. This is the best description of content or marketing segmentation. No matter how well-written your articles are, how high-quality your content is, or how qualified your experts are, it would all go to waste if it doesn’t reach the right audience.

So, you need to let the audience choose which type of content they get from you. For instance, if you are writing about various topics from politics to celebrity news, you need the right target audience for each topic.

This review website does it right:

Content marketing can be frustrating for some, especially for those whose salaries depend on it. If you found any of this information helpful, share this article to get them out of tight spots.

Bill Achola is a content marketing consultant specializing in content writing and marketing at Billacholla.com. He works closely with B2B and B2C companies providing the right content that generates social shares, comments, and traffic back to their business blogs.