Effective email marketing is more complex than simply sending an email blast to your entire list. You can increase performance exponentially by targeting a subset of your subscribers, personalizing the email message, delivering customized campaigns that are sure to prompt a response, and performing remarketing based on their interaction with your campaigns.
To promote content relevant to your subscribers, you need to know something about each individual; only then can you target them effectively. Once you know something about your targets’ preferences and interests, demographics, and location, it’s much easier to ensure you are delivering the right content.
Segment
Segment your list and present relevant content based on certain interests or demographics you’ve collected, and send the message that will best resonate with the entire subset. For example, the music industry is oriented towards genres of music. If you’re a concert promoter, you might build lists and groups based on readers’ listening preferences: country, rock, hip-hop, dance, blues, jazz, rap, folk, metal, international, and other music genres.
By profiling your customers and prospects, you’ll begin to understand their particular musical preferences, providing you with the information necessary to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. If you continue sending promotions that are not relevant to your subscribers, they will be more likely to disregard all your promotions.
Personalize
You will increase the likelihood of response, by sending highly personalized messages. At a minimum, personalization can mean addressing a recipient by their first name. Ultimately, however, true personalization means delivering emails that are tailored to the specific profile and preferences of each recipient. Using the music genre example, a concert promoter should not try and sell tickets to an upcoming hip-hop performance to subscribers only interested in jazz and folk music. You can determine subscriber preferences based on prior purchase history or by asking them about their interests and preferences.
Target
If you collect data beyond name and email address, why not use it? If you aren’t currently collecting extra demographic information now would be a great time to start.
Again, if you’re a concert promoter, important demographics you should collect include age, gender, musical tastes (country, rock, hip-hop, dance, blues, jazz, rap, folk, metal, international, and so on), state, city, and zip code. Now, if Blake Shelton is performing in Atlanta, Georgia, you can send a direct solicitation to key audience segments based on geographic area. To those subscribers who have expressed a preference for country music, you might send a more generic promotion to state residents and a more localized campaign to residents of Atlanta.
Relevancy is the key to subscriber retention and engagement; and the key to relevancy is the ability to segment your list. If you break through the clutter and engage each subscriber with relevant information and offers, they’ll continue to open, read and respond to your email messages.
Segmenting, personalizing and targeting can greatly improve the response of your email marketing campaigns, raising your open rate and click-throughs, because the message is more aligned with the recipients’ interests and preferences. Improved email campaign response translates directly into increased productivity, return on your marketing efforts and investment, and higher profitability!
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