Understand, Segment and Deliver Email Marketing

Email marketing relies on expectations, directly connecting with customers on a personal level that is relevant, consistent and useful to them. This post gives a brief overview of how to understand, segment and deliver to your audience with the aim of creating lasting relationships with your customers by providing them with valuable information.

Optimising the use of personas in the planning stage is a great way to target email communications. Identifying and speaking to customers differently can build a relationship between you and your subscriber and begins to understand the behavioural patterns of your client. When you have a sound understanding of your consumer behaviour, it is possible to use email tools to identify placements for active and inactive subscribers (the emotionally unsubscribed) and your brand loyalists into different segments. Effective segmentation can lead to engaging, personalised email communications.

How can you make personalisation more effective? By fully understanding your audience. Speak directly to individuals in real-time, time your messages to the moments when your customer is likely to engage and make a purchase. With email lists, bigger isn’t always better. The aim is to get the right message to the right people. It should feel personal; not read as a mass message.

Correctly personalised messages return six times more revenue than generic emails. Creating content that appeals to your audience will ensure you utilise email marketing to its full potential.

It is possible to separate your email list into segments based on the data you have about your subscribers, including behavioural habits, length of subscription, purchasing behaviour and more. Before you begin this, you need to first plan your business objectives and help define a primary persona.

You can begin to segment your audience and plan a campaign by following these steps:

• Choose your data

Pick your variables. This can vary within industries. Focus on the end goal of your campaign and work with the metrics that matter most to this.

• Create personas

Personas reflect who your audience is, this helps marketers understand how the audience behaves. Put yourself in the audience’s shoes, how they like to receive marketing messages, what they respond to, and how they do it.

• Select segments

Segments can be based on top-level information such as geographic location, industry, age; or on behavioural information including past purchases, interests or personalities.

• Create Content

Using what you have collected so far, email content will be focused, well informed and tailored to the individual needs of the audience. Use this as an opportunity to build a relationship. You are communicating with a human­ – use humour, be friendly, and write in your speaking voice.

• Test: Measure, Adjust and Repeat

Tracking engagement, sales and conversions of emails helps to form smart, data-driven decisions, optimising your return on investment (ROI). This can be initiated earlier in the process by A/B testing a selection of your subscribers to determine a superior strategy. This allows you to test a combination of copy, templates and techniques. Being alert to a change in behaviour provides you with a key indicator as to when it is time to adapt your strategy.

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Benefits of email marketing include the ability to produce more focused marketing messages, whilst gaining insight into what customers want from your products during the process. Integrating your email marketing efforts with your overall marketing strategy is simple and can include blog posts, social media, events and more.

Email marketing is a great way to build a deeper one to one relationship with clients. It helps subscribers get to know and trust your company. Regular emails help to increase success rate by reminding clients of your presence; be consistent so that subscribers look forward to receiving your mail, don’t overload them to the point that your work will be sent to their spam box. Finding the correct frequency can be a process of trial and error. Monitor your metrics to identify your subscriber’s behaviour. Track your CTR, bounce, conversion, sharing and growth rates and ROI.

The aim should be to deliver value to your recipients. Adding links increases value and gives your subscribers the ability to continue their journey. Remember to use this in wisely, linking to un-reputable or irrelevant content indicates spam to the user and email provider. Using strong, relevant links in moderation will add value to your email, blog or web page.

Once your content is mastered, you must ensure your subject line entices your audience to open your email. How this is structured depends on your audience and content.

Some options include starting by explaining the resource you have pulled together followed by the specific reason. Spark some curiosity, or, alternatively, jump straight to the point. In the subject line is another opportunity to make the communication personalised and timely – similarly to how it is done in your content. Try to avoid no-reply sender names, these are far more likely to be sent to the spam box, you’re speaking to a human so sending an email from one is more inviting.

50% of emails are opened on mobile devices, meaning a lengthy subject line will cropped. Between six and ten words earn a 21% open rate. Being able to condense your subject line into this range will help you both inform and entice your audience by getting to the point.

Remember:

• Be transparent­: send bulk emails from the same email and IP address.
• Only add subscribers to your list who have actively opted in­ – this can be taken further by utilising opt-in confirmations.
• Employ a simple unsubscribe option.