Why You Need to Try Targeted Email Marketing
Imagine a person living inside your brain.
Their desk is in the center of your forehead. Neuroscientists call this somewhat cramped office the prefrontal area of the frontal lobes.
Imagine that this person is hard at work organizing all incoming sensory data. Every ding and bell vying for your attention. Every new email request. The to-do list.
Your ability to process this data relies on what neuroscientists call executive function.
We can imagine that when we call on our executive function to make decisions in life, a person is sitting in the frontal lobes managing all of the competing priorities that come up when trying to choose a product in the modern marketplace.
The person in the brain has a lot on their plate.
What if I told you that the key to improving your email marketing is to make the executive sitting in your audience’s brain as happy as possible?
Still with me? Good, step two is to understand that the best way to befriend the person in the brain is to use targeted email marketing instead of blasting out general email updates.
Why? Targeted email marketing transforms your email list into a revenue-generating asset by building trust with your audience.
With the right strategy, you can create campaigns that maximize audience trust and minimize audience frustration.
Let’s jump into the best reasons to use targeted email marketing for your business.
Targeted Email Marketing Increases Revenue
The first step in our journey to understand targeted email marketing is the why. Why should you spend your marketing resources investing in targeted email marketing? Well, if you get this marketing strategy right, you’ll make progress on your most important business metrics.
In fact, the researchers at Litmus discovered that email campaigns generate $36 for every dollar spent. Ultimately, you’ll increase your revenue once you embark on this type of marketing campaign.
Targeted email marketing campaigns send readers the right to the heart of the matter. With effective campaigns, you communicate exactly what you do and exactly why your audience should care. This clarity of thought makes the decision making process easier for your audience during the buying process.
Positioning
Let’s say there’s a company that helps businesses translate their content into Spanish. Imagine two scenarios. In the first scenario, they build an email campaign that talks about all the details of the translation. The email goes into laborious detail about the costs and features of the service, then the amount of time it takes to implement.
A reader opens the email, skims over it quickly, yawns, and opens Twitter.
In the second scenario, they build a targeted email campaign. This one talks specifically about the benefits of translating content to expand audiences and help with expansion into a new market segment. It paints a vivid picture of helping people in an untapped market move closer to their goals in life.
The same reader opens it, skims, ponders briefly before going through the email more closely. After two or three minutes, they forward to their supervisor. “Do you think we should try this out?”
What did the second email get right? It effectively positioned the translation company as a resource that helps solve a specific problem.
Positioning is how you use your core messages to describe how you help your audience. Making it simple for your audience to understand is a win-win proposition.
When you use your email content to create a personalized message for your audience, you can create new customers and increase your conversion rate.
Also, remember the brain example we spoke of earlier? This executive in your reader’s brain has a lot on their plate. If you can connect the dots about how your offers create value, this person will be happy.
Your initial legwork to help your subscribers connect the dots is effective positioning. Not only is this a service to your subscribers, but it also helps you as well. Again, positioning your brand effectively will increase your conversion rates on the back end.
Clarity Equals a Happy Brain
Think back to moments in your life when you thought, “I get it.”
Now, contrast that with moments when you read something, eyes glazing over with confusion, wondering, “What exactly is this person saying?”
The former helps that tired brain person make decisions and sort incoming information. The latter makes them cranky.
We want happy executive brain people on our email list. Targeted email marketing gets you there. In short, it increases retention on your email list by describing how you want to help.
Whether a particular reader is ready to buy or not depends on where they’re at in the decision-making process. However, marketers that use a targeted email marketing strategy are on their way to creating clarity and giving their audience a pleasant experience.
Targeted Email Marketing Builds Trust
So, you’re on board with using targeted emails to generate clarity in your readers.Next, you need to understand how targeted emails solve another mission-critical business problem.
How do I communicate trust? You can use emails to connect exactly what you offer with exactly what individual audience members need.
Targeted email marketing helps connect what your audience needs and what you offer.
User Experience
Another important targeted email marketing concept is user experience. When it comes to your email marketing strategy, user experience (or UX) refers to creating relevant content.
Email marketing efforts that center the most relevant messages are more likely to succeed. It’s important to understand that the intention for every email is to make it easier for the recipient to move closer to buying.
Anything that helps in this process is a good user experience. Anything that gets in the way is a terrible user experience.
At first glance, it may seem confusing to hear about UX and email marketing. Design discussions are typically centered on landing page creation, A/B testing, or opt-in pages.
However, when you focus on user experience in your email content, you will delight new subscribers on your list.
Generally, it’s easier to trust a small business that does the work to make information transparent and accessible.
Email Marketing for Specific Pain Points
Imagine you get one of two emails. The first is a welcome email that generally talks about the company. It includes a basic history and an outline of what you can expect from their services.
Ding, another notification comes in. You leave the email never to return.
The second is a hyper-focused email that speaks directly to a pain point you’re currently experiencing. It feels like the writer is speaking directly to your experience. You notice they’ve highlighted specific examples when they’ve helped people like you.
Ding, you quickly dismiss the notification. Before you know it, you’re three pages deep on their website. You bookmark it, ready to return at a later time.
How did the second email achieve this? They wrote a targeted email that speaks to a specific pain point their target audience is experiencing. The power of targeted emails comes from the freedom to experiment with addressing various pain points in your content marketing mix as opposed to blasting out generic messages.
Buying Intent
Sometimes, you just don’t have the correct information to buy yet. Perhaps your readers need buy-in from a partner, family member, or colleague. Maybe they’re still looking at reviews. Sometimes, they don’t even know that certain products and services exist yet.
This process of monitoring the customer journey is also known as tracking buying intent.
Buying intent is a way to describe how potential customers can be grouped in different, but predictable stages of a decision-making process.
With this buying intent in mind, marketers can craft powerful promotional emails by segmenting their email list by buying intent.
This segmenting allows you to create relevant messages for your audience. Email marketing relevancy is how you keep open rates high.
Make Targeted Email Marketing Easy
Now that you’ve done the hard work of learning how to leverage targeted email marketing, let’s get real about your day-to-day work.
Sure, it would be great to implement a new marketing tactic. But is there really time to do this?
Using the right email marketing tools makes the process easy. An effective email marketing tool should allow you to do the following:
- List segmentation
- Create personalized email and subject lines
- Track relevant metrics
Segmentation
A critical tactic in targeted email marketing is segmentation. You can group members of your list into segments based on demographics. You can also group contacts into specific pain points or by buying intent.
Here is a number of segment based options you can try:
- Survey or quiz results
- City or state
- Past purchases
- Website behavior
With a tool like Gumbamail, a Chrome extension that allows you to launch targeted email marketing campaigns, you can make this happen without expensive CRM or marketing automation software.
Personalization
When you’re evaluating email marketing services, make sure personalization is an available feature. It’s one of the most valuable tactics for your targeted email marketing campaign.
You need the capability to address your subscribers using data they’ve opted to share with you. Segmenting your audience in this way helps with engagement and relevancy.
Purchase history (especially for e-commerce brands) and first names are particularly powerful personalization choices.
Email Reporting Analytics
Another vital feature for an email marketing service is reporting capabilities. Here are a few things you want to know when you’re evaluating your campaigns:
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- Unsubscribe rates
Ultimately, you want to see how leads that you engage with targeted email marketing move through the sales funnel.
Robust email marketing reporting capabilities are important because they allow you to incrementally improve.
It’s essential to analyze how targeted email marketing compares to your other marketing initiatives like SEO, social media, and other channels. You want to make sure this tactic is driving revenue.
Keep these essentials in mind when you’re evaluating an email marketing software, an email service provider, or a tool that lets you stay in Gmail.
Targeted Emails Delight Your Email List
There are three things you need to know about targeted email marketing.
First, it helps generate revenue by clearly describing how your offerings create value. Then, by connecting the dots between what you do and what your audience needs, targeted email marketing establishes trust between you and your audience.
And third, the most important thing to understand about targeted email marketing is that you need the right tools to unleash its power.
If you’re ready to take the next step, download the Gumbamail Chrome extension to give our tool a spin.