Targeted email marketing is a powerful tool when used by the right marketer. It’s proven to deliver huge increases in ROI, forge deeper, more meaningful connections with customers, and generate far more value for recipients.
In this article, we’ll share detailed information on targeted email marketing including:
- What Is Targeted Email Marketing?
- Key Benefits of Targeted Email Marketing
- Creating A Targeted Email Marketing Campaign
What Is Targeted Email Marketing?
Standard email marketing is a great way to communicate with customers and develop relationships with them. Businesses usually use email to stay in touch with their customers, educate them about their products or services, and build brand loyalty. They might also use email marketing to advise them of new promotions or events.
Not all email marketing campaigns, however, are created equal. Targeted email marketing takes this a step further by sending a message that is specifically tailored to the recipient. Targeted email marketing requires marketers to break down their email list into smaller groups based on specific criteria such as profile data, behavior, location, and more. This allows you to tailor your message to each individual segment.
Let's say you own a clothing store. You might have a segment of customers who have recently purchased items from your summer collection, you can send them an email showcasing your upcoming fall collection with a message that emphasizes how these new items would perfectly complement their summer purchases.
The more specific you are able to make your segments, the more relevant your message will be. By successfully implementing these segments you can deliver a message that is meaningful to each individual recipient. Do that and you'll quickly begin to establish a strong, personal connection with them.
Using a targeted email marketing approach allows you to avoid the one-size-fits-all approach used by many businesses in their campaigns. Instead, you'll create a personalized, targeted message that speaks directly to each customer's needs and interests.
Key Benefits of Targeted Email Marketing
There are a huge number of benefits to delivering a more targeted email marketing campaign, what follows, however, are the most important. These are the benefits that are most likely to convince you to move to a more targeted approach.
More Relevant
One of the main advantages of targeted email marketing is that you naturally will be sending more relevant messages to your target audience. Your message can be tailored to each individual recipient by segmenting your email list, ensuring that it speaks directly to their interests and needs.
Collecting information about your subscribers as part of your onboarding process and reminding them to update their marketing preferences on a regular basis is a good way to get to know them. Then leverage that data to create your targeted campaigns.
Customers that receive more relevant marketing content are far more likely to engage with it, especially if the content is personalized to them. This means that they perceive the emails as more valuable, leading to a better click-through rate, and an increase in conversions.
Deeper Connection
Targeted email marketing can aid in the development of deeper relationships with subscribers. When you send relevant messages, you demonstrate the value of your brand and strengthen the overall relationship over time. Customers will value your marketing more if you know them and send them personalized emails.
Regularly delivered relevant content raises customer expectations, and meeting or exceeding these expectations increases trust and respect for your brand. In the long run, this results in a stronger, more sustainable relationship.
Improved Return on Investment
Targeted email marketing can also lead to a higher return on investment (ROI). Targeted emails will naturally have a greater appeal to customers and tend to result in faster conversions. More conversions mean more revenue.
Even using simple segmentation, such as age and gender, can have an impressive impact on your ROI. If, however, you’re able to get even more specific by using data on the customer’s previous purchase history or their viewing activities, the effect will be even more pronounced.
Better Retention Rates
Targeted email marketing also improves customer retention. By fostering a deeper connection with your subscribers and you'll naturally encourage them to stay engaged with your brand.
Retention is critical for any business, and using targeted email marketing can help keep your subscribers interested and invested in your brand. Learning about your audience and optimizing campaigns on a regular basis gives you the ability to keep customers engaged and ensure that they receive value from your emails, resulting in higher retention rates.
Creating A Targeted Email Marketing Campaign
Each campaign will run in a slightly different way, but the following steps should be a core part of your process each time:
Gather Your Data
The first step is to collect as much information about your audience as possible. This is typically completed through your website and (with the right marketing permissions) is submitted by the customers themselves. When they complete a purchase, create an account, or sign up for a mailing list, try and absorb as much information as you can. This might involve using tracking systems such as cookies, so be sure that you’re remaining compliant in your activities.
Some people store this information on their website, others use a CRM system.
Connect Your Stack
Whatever tools you’re using to run your marketing campaign, now is the time to make sure that they are able to connect easily. Check for out-of-the-box integrations, if they’re not available, then you might have to seek third-party support. The majority of leading tools have integrations available, Instantly connects with any email provider, and then with a whole host of CRMs and other tools.
Investigate Your Audience
At this point, before you begin to create content, you need to consider what your audience actually wants to hear. Take this to a granular level based on your campaign plan. Are you going to target a specific demographic? If so, consider what style of content they engage with. You might be looking to engage with people interested in a specific line of products or services. If that’s the case consider why that appeals to them, and other crossover interests.
The options are, quite literally, endless. You should just experiment as you go.
Craft Tailored Content
Once you’ve got everything in place, it’s time to craft your content. Always have the audience in mind and keep your research from the previous step close by. It often helps to imagine an actual customer, and then create content for them. At the heart of your content, always aim to deliver value. If your content is relevant and valuable, you’re on to a winner.
Unleash The Power Of Your Email Software
For all the talk of personalization, it’s unlikely that you’re actually going to write a unique email per customer. That’s simply unachievable, especially at scale. Instead, you should seek to create emails for segments of your audience, and then use your email software to send these emails as one campaign. You’ll need to use merge tags to save time. These are embedded into your template and are automatically replaced with data about each customer at the time of sending.
Analyze The Results And Adapt
Once your campaign is underway, and recipients are engaging with it, spend time looking at your analytics and core email marketing metrics. These statistics will help you to understand what’s working, what needs improvement, and what should be removed. Tweak future campaigns based on these metrics, and you’ll have a winning campaign in no time.
Key Takeaways
By leveraging targeted email marketing you’ll soon be fostering deeper connections with an audience that has a high level of trust in you thanks to your relevant and valuable content. That will naturally lead to a higher ROI, more revenue for your business, and more success.
- Be sure to use an email marketing tool that can cope with targeted email marketing at scale.
- Analyze and assess your results before launching a new campaign.
- Always aim to deliver value to your recipients.
Feel ready to launch a targeted email marketing campaign? You’ll want Instantly on your side, the feature-packed free trial is a great way to get started.