Email marketing is one of the most efficient and cost-effective mediums for advertising today. It can also yield a massive ROI of up to $42 for every $1 spent (an ROI of 4,200%).
One of the reasons for email marketing's smashing success is its ability to target consumer segments on a very granular level. Proper use of targeted email can help you reach, engage with, and move your specific audience further along the buyer's journey. Here are a few of the ways you can implement this strategy to maximum effect:
Measure Immediate Impact of Targeted Emails
In the world of marketing, half the battle is getting your message out to the right people. Of course, a foundational step towards achieving this objective is conducting extensive target persona research, using data you've already collected from customers as well as focused interviews and other methods. It's important to remember, though, that your buyer personas are subject to change and need to be continually reviewed and refined for best results.
Email marketing analytics take your game to the next level because email campaigns provide virtually instantaneous feedback on how well you're performing and insight into your audience. For instance, open and clickthrough rates let you know how many consumers you're engaging during a campaign and how many are taking action as a result. A/B testing can help you to refine your copy even further and make your marketing more convincing.
While you don't have to reinvent the wheel with each new email campaign, you can incrementally refine your tactics until you reach more of the benchmarks you want to see.
Personalize Your Messaging More Easily
Email marketing typically shines the brightest as part of an overall effort to nurture your prospects and leads — e.g., to develop deeper, long-lasting customer relationships. Email is such a well-aligned medium for this strategy because you can easily develop personalized offers and messages for your core group of customers based on several factors, such as their demographics, attributes, and previous purchase behavior.
As an example of segmentation and personalization, you can send out promotions for an upgraded subscription plan to those consumers that would most likely be interested in the offer. Doing so provides the dual benefits of:
- Reaching the people that will provide the highest ROI on your campaign
- Avoiding the impression that you're trying to "push" your product or service on consumers that aren't interested in it
Sending personalized emails to customer segments — emails that contain unique offerings based on their audience — indicates that you value and care about your consumer base. Over time, this strategy will help you to establish a deeper level of trust with your customers.
Scale Campaigns with Automation Software
Manually executing an email campaign would be time-consuming and exhausting. However, using automation software as a tool to facilitate the execution of your campaign makes everything much more manageable. Automated email marketing software empowers you to personalize your emails at scale, whether you're sending out a few dozen or a few thousand messages each week, especially if you personalize your offerings through list segmentation based on analytics and target persona research.
As an example of how this works in practice, you could set up several automated email "sequences" (each sequence being a series of emails triggered by a specific customer action). One sequence could launch when a customer purchases a particular item. Perhaps the customer will receive an order confirmation email immediately after the purchase, a follow-up "welcome" email the next day, and then a cross-promotional email highlighting an adjacent product within the next week.
The beauty of such automation is that you can make your personalization as broad or as fine-tuned as you like. For example, imagine that you run an e-commerce store for footwear. If one customer buys a running shoe and another buys a pair of beach sandals, each could receive completely different email sequences.
With automated email marketing software in your pocket, you'll be able to reach various niche audiences with your content, build those relationships, and grow your brand quickly and effectively.
Leverage Email Marketing to Grow Your Business
Email marketing is a highly effective (and cost-effective) channel for reaching the right audience for your brand. It gives you significant power and flexibility by delivering immediate performance feedback for your campaign, personalizing your messaging, and engaging with prospects using automated tools.
If you haven't done so already, explore the many options available to you for leveraging email marketing to grow your business. Perhaps you can seek the assistance of an experienced media partner as well. If you put forth the effort, you'll find rich rewards for years to come!
