Contributed article in our business series. Enjoy! – Kimberly
While email marketing has been around for years, the way that marketers develop campaigns has evolved over the years. If you’re not an expert in this area then you would be forgiven for thinking that it is fairly basic . . . you write an email and send it to your list of contacts.
Years of research has gone into calculating the most effective way of developing email campaigns, and this research has shown that 77% of email marketing ROI came from segmented, targeted and triggered emails. So, just sending a “one size fits all” email is not going to get you the results that you are looking for.
Segmentation is leading the way in email marketing methods, and marketers are now focusing more and more on this approach. What drives the success is the ability to craft emails that are personalized to the recipient, using data that is known about them. By being specific to the interests and needs of a targeted set of people, the chances of them opening the email, reading it fully, and then acting on it, are much greater.
In a world where we might receive hundreds of emails in a day, making your email the one that gets through the raft of others is a difficult task, but personalization enables a much higher success rate. Typically segmentation can be based on the following data: age, gender, purchase history, location, industry, etc. If you also have information regarding the behavior of a potential customer, you can tailor your emails to appeal to something that they are interested in.
If you know that they have been viewing a certain product, then sending an email – perhaps with a discount for that product – would have a much higher success rate than sending a generic email about all of your products. Learning how to use data is critical to building a successful email marketing campaign.
A good way to gather data is to send out a survey or quiz. Now, people don’t like giving up their precious time, so you have to be creative with how you position it. An incentive like a prize draw tends to get better completion results. By asking the right types of questions you can glean lots of valuable data that you can use to build your strategy.
Analysis of the data that you have is an important part of structuring your email strategy. Information about past purchases can be used to estimate when they might need this product again if it is something that is consumed. If you can see that someone purchases a holiday trip at a certain time each year, and you are a travel agent, then you know exactly when you need to send that email offering a holiday excursion. The same concept applies for all types of industries, and many events throughout the year can also be used in the same way. If you know that someone always buys a dozen roses on Valentine’s Day for example, then Feb. 14 is the right time to ping them about sending flowers for that holiday.
Tune your emails and your marketing will resonate with your customers!
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