Building Audience Engagement With Emails
Email campaigns are an especially valuable part of any online marketing plan. They get your message straight into the inboxes of people who’ve already expressed interest in your offerings. That’s just the basic outline, though. In practice, email campaigns can drill down even further into specific audience segments. Personalized email campaigns that speak directly to your audience’s needs are the key to driving meaningful engagement. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should handcraft a new email for each recipient, but it does mean that different types of recipients should receive emails constructed to appeal to their specific category.
Segmenting your audience means collecting data on the things that set different customers apart. As just one example, new customers and long-term customers should receive different messages addressing their specific needs. Creating buyer personas—fictional representations of ideal customers—is helpful here. Based on demographic and behavioural data, you can sort members of your email list into various buyer persona categories and construct emails for them accordingly. Professional marketers use advanced software to collect and analyze enormous amounts of data, allowing them to create the most accurate buyer personas possible.
Email Marketing Tips
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel when crafting email marketing strategies. Instead, you can follow a trusty list of best practices:
- Concise, compelling subject lines that avoid the pitfalls spam filters look for
- Emails that get to the point instead of frustrating readers with fluff
- Visually obvious calls to action
- Emails that look good and are easy to read on a variety of devices
- A schedule for sending emails at the right times for each audience segment
- Thorough data collection and analysis to see how your campaign is performing
Meanwhile, you’ll want to avoid common pitfalls like inconsistency, excessive frequency, outdated email lists, or using “salesy” language reminiscent of scam emails.
Measuring Results
Tracking campaign results is just as important as the campaign itself. After all, the alternative is relying on guesswork. That might not seem like a big deal until you consider that even seemingly tiny changes in a campaign can lead to wildly different results. Successful use of audience segmentation depends on the details. Measuring the performance of your campaign is a complex job. You must assess open rates to compare your results to industry averages and see whether your subject lines are effectively grabbing attention. You also need to measure click-through rates—the rates at which people who open various emails actually click through to your site—which will show which emails spur customers to action. Conversion tracking tells you what percentage of people followed through on your CTA. It can be challenging, though, because so many things can happen between a customer receiving your email and doing what you asked of them. For example, they might open your email and click through to your website, close the tab to think about your offerings, and then come back later through Google. Tracking the disorganized steps many people follow when acting on CTAs requires significant technical skill. Web marketing experts use high-end analytics tools to collect and decipher the relevant data.
