Email marketing continues to be a powerful tool for businesses seeking to engage and convert customers.
It is a form of digital marketing that businesses can use to promote their products and/or services, build relationships, and drive customer action. A thoughtful email marketing strategy can provide customers with valuable information to help them make better purchasing decisions. Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective tools for reaching your customers. Despite the growing popularity of social media and other digital platforms, the simplicity of an email still holds a prime spot in the world of marketing. To harness the full potential of this powerful communication tool, businesses must develop compelling techniques to engage and convert their target audience.
Advanced email marketing refers to tools and techniques that help to manage interactions with customers and improve overall email communication.
It can also refer to strategies that can help optimize email marketing to increase click rates, which can lead to higher conversion rates and revenue.
With consistent effort and attention to detail, you can elevate your email marketing to drive growth and strengthen your customer relationships. This will yield impressive results for your business. And let’s be honest, that’s our main goal! But how can you get there? What techniques do you need in advanced email marketing to make this happen? People don’t just give their email to anyone. You need to give them a reason to sign up to receive your business emails. Need some help? We got you!
Now let’s break down two very different techniques that can ultimately work together in advanced email marketing: Segmentation and Personalization.
Segmentation is the WHO. Personalization is the WHAT.
While segmentation in email marketing identifies the who and who not to send an email to, personalization automatically identifies what to send in an email to each person.
Segmentation: Advanced email segmentation is a strategy in email marketing that involves dividing an email list into groups to send more personalized content to your contacts and customers. It can help you streamline how you filter contacts and test your email marketing campaigns. With advanced segmentation, you can add a set of conditions that allow for different combinations of data you’ve collected. This could be things such as purchase activity, gender, age range, and more. This can lead to better campaign performance and lower spam reports.
As soon as someone signs up to your list, you learn a few things about them. Even if you don’t use certain “checkboxes” to ask about their preferences, you know which page they signed up on, which lead magnet they were interested in, and even what time of day they joined your list. Based on that, you can divide your subscribers into different groups or segments so you can better create a target campaign. This also allows you to avoid annoying people with offers that aren’t interesting to them which could lead to the dreaded “unsubscribe” button.
Here are some examples of data you can use to segment your email marketing list:
- Past purchase history: this includes what they bought, how much they spent, and how how often they made a purchase
- Browsing behaviors and interests: which of your products and/or services peak their interest
- Demographics: information that can be collected through opt-in forms at different stages of a visitor’s activity on your website
- Where they are in the customer journey: how close are they to actually making a purchase
- Email frequency preferences: how often they prefer to receive emails
- Engagement levels: how engaged the customers are with the brand
The more information you can gather from your customers, the more options you have to segment your list.
Personalization: Now that we’ve talked about the importance of segmentation with email marketing, we need to touch on personalization. And no, I don’t mean just adding a subscriber’s first name to the top of the email and calling it good. To remain relevant, you must focus on leveraging personalization to create memorable customer experiences. There are so many ways you can personalize your emails to make each one unique to each customer on a one-to-one level. And you can do this by depending on the data you have segmented on your customers. In fact, personalization based on a user’s interests and demographic characteristics often has more success than forcing the idea of a personal connection just by using someone’s name.
You can personalize the subject lines of your email, personalize product recommendations based on your customer’s previous purchases, or announce in-store promotions based on customer’s locations. By adapting the content of your email campaigns to the individual profile of your customers you can increase conversion through personalization.
Another technique is to customize when you send your emails based on when your customers are most likely to check their inbox. While we’d all love a specific “best” day and time for email marketing, the reality is there’s really no such thing. When someone checks their email and is most likely to engage with them can depend on a large number of factors such as their daily routine, the kind of work they do, and even their age.
While there’s no “best time to send for everyone,” you can still personalize your send times by creating relevant segments based on a combination of the following factors:
- The subscriber’s timezone: you’ll need to take this into account because even a few hours difference can have a significant impact on your campaign performance.
- The subscriber’s age
- The subscriber’s profession or industry: work hours can affect when a customer will be checking their email
- When the subscriber usually engages with your emails.
By personalizing when you send the emails you can optimize the attention it may receive from each subscriber. Your customers are people, and people want to be treated like they matter.
To stay competitive, personalization in email marketing is an absolute must!
Even though segmentation and personalization in advanced email marketing are two different techniques, they should still be a part of every email campaign. Personalization individualizes the content of an email making it personal to the subscriber. Segmentation creates a different content variation for each segment helping you make the personalization happen.
