If you are not reaching out to your audience on an individual level, you are not reaching out to them in the right way. Today’s consumer already feels like most businesses treat him like a number. He hates the mass email, the generalized content that is not really specific to him or his needs. If this is the kind of content that you have been serving up to your prospective customers, you are not going to be seeing the huge returns that you could be seeing. One of the best ways to increase revenue is to personalize your email communications and your social media accounts.

Your #local business deserves local support. Say no to the big guys who treat you like a number. #SupportLocal

— Lori Lopez (@urcreditcardgal) April 26, 2016

People want to feel as if they are being approached on a personal level, not that they are just one in a thousand customers that you are trying to get to give you money. Just as you probably hate being a nameless, faceless number to big corporations, your potential customers hate being generalized, too. Here’s how to personalize your email and social media presences to make sure that you are reaching out to people on an individual level:

Email

If you want someone to unsubscribe from your list, send them irrelevant, impersonal messages that have very little to do with their personal needs or wants. If you have been seeing people jump ship from your subscriber list, this is probably way: you are sending them content that feels generic. And while some people might actually like and benefit from that generic content, most people already get too much annoying email and will unsubscribe from your list rather than just delete your messages or put them in their spam folder. Personalization ensures that people actually open your email and connect with it.

• Utilize your merge tags. Merge tags are an opportunity to send out dynamic emails. If you are on a system like MailChimp, you should already have a merge tag that allows you to pull data out of your list. For example, you should be able to find a customer’s first name (which can be used in the body of the email to make it feel more personal) or to create a coupon code or URL that is specific to each person. You can even create conditional tags that can exempt certain people from certain campaigns. If it can easily be fit into an “IF,” “ELSE,” or “ELSEIF” scenario, you should be able to create specific blocks of content or products that are plugged into emails to certain consumers depending on your history with that customer, their location, their age, etc.

• Make sure to segment your list. Not every person on your list should be receiving every single email you send out. Not every email is going to be relevant to every single person on your list, so if you always send out every single email to every person, you end up driving some of those people away. There are lots of ways that you can segment your list, from targeting people who signed up on, before, or after a certain date, to just people who are new, to those who have shown interest in a specific feature, to those who are more or less engaged, and beyond. Most mass mailing tools have segmentation solutions that make it easy to split up your email list, but you could also just use a spreadsheet to put your email subscribers into different lists.

Social Media

Because social media is, at its core, a place to be social (hence the name), personalization on this platform is perhaps more important than anywhere else online. This type of media is a great way to keep your products or services at the forefront of your audience’s mind, but only if you are creating content and ads that are actually going to draw in your target audience. Everyone is now used to seeing promoted content on their timelines, so these venues are ideal places to recruit new subscribers. Here are some suggestions to make the most out of your social media profiles

Target specific twitter audiences.

Twitter can be a cheap way to get your business’s name out there, but only if you actually use their Tailored Audiences tool. You can automatically export a list of more than five thousand subscribers right to Twitter, allow you to find them on the platform even if they do not follow. For example, if you have someone’s email address because they have recently made a purchase from your store, you should be able to promote something new to them on Twitter. This is the one of the best ways to market to people who have already spent money on your business and because the format makes it easy to like and retweet an advertisement, you could even convince them to market your business for you to their own followers.

Use Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool.

Facebook has over a billion daily users, making it still one of the best places to try to reach out to your target audiences. It’s the same basic concept as Twitter’s Tailored Audiences tool—you upload your email addresses list and they find those people on their own platform and market directly to them. The tool even syncs automatically to services like MailChimp, so you can easily target customers who have just been newly added to your list