Around 196 billion emails are sent every day and 109 billion are from businesses. This type of communication is therefore a perfect way to reach your customers. Hence, this article is about how to target your audience in email marketing.
An emailing strategy is a marketing strategy that can be very useful for your business. Indeed, a well-done email campaign makes it possible to engage your prospects when they are checking their inbox.
However, it is not enough to send emails once in a while. Your customers and prospects receive dozens of them a day, open only a small number of them, and very rarely engage. Email marketing should be one of your favorite tools because it remains one of the most effective ways to acquire new contacts and customers.
Now, without further ado, let’s learn tips to target your audience in an email marketing campaign.
- Define the objectives of your emailing strategy:
First of all, determine what the objectives of your emailing campaign are.
Let’s illustrate some of the most common email marketing goals:
– Increase brand visibility,
– Increase sales,
– Attract new customers,
– Strengthen your relationship with your former clients.
- Segment your contacts:
The more your email matches your reader’s expectations, the better. What is relevant for one is not necessarily interesting for another. So, you need to segment your audience.
How you choose to segment your contacts depends on your business.
Let’s take an example:
– A fashion retailer can group customers by gender, while for a software publisher, it makes more sense to create segments based on subscription types.
Segmentation can be divided into four main categories:
– Geographical: allows you to understand where and in what conditions your target audience lives.
– Demographic: This allows you to understand the social characteristics of your target audience.
– Behavioral: allows you to identify common behaviors and interests.
– Psychographic: allows you to assess and understand individual attitudes, values, and lifestyles, in order to establish your priorities.
The goal of segmentation is to better satisfy, retain and serve your customers. And therefore, increase the effectiveness of your emailing campaigns.
You can use many tools to do the segmentation properly, including Google Analytics, Leadar and MailerLite.
- Pay attention to the subject lines of your emails:
When a subscriber receives your email, the first thing they see is the subject line and often the first sentence below it. It can be the deciding factor on whether or not a user opens your email.
The subject of an email is essential for your emailing strategy because it has a direct impact on the opening rate.
– Be brief
– Tell them what to expect and use action verbs
– Avoid using the words that trigger the spam alert (casino, money, Mastercard, Visa…)
– Convey a sense of urgency
– Don’t make false promises
- Use storytelling in your emailing strategy:
Stories have rocked us since childhood and emotions punctuate our daily lives. Adding a dose of storytelling to your email campaign will definitely make you stand out and can be incredibly useful for:
– Distinguishing yourself from your competitors,
– Creating an attachment to the brand,
– Maximizing the positive impact of your campaign,
– Reinforcing the identity of your company.
- Optimize your emails for mobile:
Many people check their emails while on the go or during downtime. And the mobile phone is the most convenient way to check your emails wherever you are. Take this into account when developing your emailing strategy. You should design your emails to be readable and clear on mobile phones.
- Create behavioral emails:
The growing adoption of web tracking tools and CRMs offers new opportunities for behavioral targeting. And you really have to integrate them into your emailing strategy.
To make it simple, let’s take an example:
– You are surfing on an eCommerce site where you are already a customer and therefore identified by it,
– You add a product to your shopping cart,
– You are interrupted by a call, you forget your basket and you go about your other business,
– 1 hour later, you receive an email reminding you that there is a product left in your shopping cart.
This is called a behavioral email. It is a very targeted message taking into account your behavioral data.
- Make it easy to unsubscribe:
It may seem counter-intuitive to make it easy for your subscribers to unsubscribe. After all, you will lose a subscriber. But from a long-term perspective, it is very useful. If someone does not want to receive emails from you, they may be frustrated if they continue to receive them. They may even mark them as spam, which will negatively impact your email campaign.
- Pick the right time:
Another factor to consider is when you send your emails. When is the best time to send an email campaign to your subscribers? There is no scientific answer to this question. The best time depends on your target audience and your goals. Test different times and check your responsiveness rates to find the best time.
- Test your email campaigns:
No emailing strategy is effective without experimentation. Do A/B tests to see which topics, which call to action (CTA), which content, and which formats perform the best. This may vary from segment to segment, but over time you should identify certain trends.
When doing A/B testing, it’s best to only test one item at a time. This way, you can draw relevant conclusions regarding each factor tested. Once you’ve sent your emails, take the time to understand how users react to them. Track and analyze your open rate, click rate, unsubscribes, reactions, etc.
Testing and analyzing your results is the only way to improve your emailing strategy.
- Analyze your performance:
For long-term optimization, analyzing your performance is absolutely essential. As your business and your audience evolve, you may need to modify various elements of your email strategy.
Track your key performance indicators (KPIs) to quickly identify areas that need optimization. Here are the main KPIs you should pay attention to:
– Deliverability rate,
– Reactivity rate,
– Click through rate,
– Churn rate,
– Conversion rate.
Email marketing is the most effective way to create a relationship with your customers and generate a significant return on investment. And so, with these useful tips, you will be able to target your audience in email marketing.