Targeted Email Marketing: Use These Strategies to Boost Conversions
If your emails aren’t quite hitting the mark, there are various possible reasons for it. A good place to start would be to ask yourself: are my emails targeted well?
Targeted emails can help you make a strong and compelling pitch to your recipients. This is possible by leveraging customer data and using insights to send content that connects with them. It’s a far better strategy than sending an email blast with content you “think” they’ll like.
There are many methods to implement targeted emails effectively — read on to learn all about them.
Targeted Email Marketing: What is It?
Targeted email marketing is a strategy that involves sending personalized and relevant email messages to your audience. The goal is to appeal to specific segments of the email list, rather than sending the same message to all contacts.
With targeted emails, you can improve engagement, make emails more relevant, achieve more sales/conversions, and eventually build customer satisfaction. These goals are achievable by sending targeted emails that can pique the specific interests of different audience segments.
The Benefits of Sending Targeted Emails
Targeted emails can completely flip the results of your email marketing activities.
Check out these potential benefits you could observe by making your emails more relevant and targeted.
- More personal: Targeted emails include personalized greetings, product recommendations, and content, making recipients feel valued and understood.
- More relevant: Delivering content tailored to the recipient’s preferences and behaviors makes emails more engaging and pertinent to their interests.
- Better engagement: Personalized and segmented emails capture the recipient’s attention, leading to higher open rates and click-through rates (CTR).
- Lower unsubscribes: Relevant and valuable emails are less likely to lead to unsubscribes, maintaining a stable and engaged subscriber base.
- Better timing: Sending targeted emails at the right time, such as during seasonal promotions or after recent purchases, increases the likelihood of conversion.
- Better customer retention and conversion: Automated emails based on customer actions, like abandoned cart reminders or post-purchase follow-ups, encourage purchases and repeat business.
- Improved ROI: Focusing on segments more likely to respond positively allows you to better allocate your resources, leading to higher ROI (return on investment).
- Optimized campaigns: Targeted campaigns often yield better results with fewer emails sent, reducing your costs and minimizing the risk of being flagged as spam.
- Better segmentation: Continuous analysis lets you refine segments, ensuring more precise and effective targeting over time.
- Brand reputation: Regularly sending relevant and useful content builds trust and loyalty, encouraging customers to stay with your brand.
- Grab attention: Personalized and relevant emails stand out in crowded inboxes, capturing and retaining recipient attention.
- Beat the competition: Sending targeted emails can help you adapt to changing customer preferences and market trends, staying ahead of your competitors.
There are various methods you must adopt to make your messages more targeted to your readers. Let’s learn more about them next.
Strategies for Targeted Email Marketing
If you want your email campaigns to resonate more with your audience, you’ll have to learn how to collect data, study it, and use it effectively. The table below explains the processes you will need to fine-tune to get it right.
The top 5 strategies for implementing targeted email marketing are:
Strategy | What is it? | How does it help with targeted emails? |
---|---|---|
List segmentation | Dividing your email list into smaller groups based on specific criteria. | This allows for more precise targeting and ensures each segment receives relevant content. |
Email personalization | Customizing your emails to address the individual recipient’s needs. | Helps tailor content based on their history or preferences. |
Content relevance | Ensuring the email content is highly relevant to the recipient’s interests and needs. | Providing content that is tailored to what the recipient cares about increases the likelihood of engagement. |
Campaign metrics analysis | Continuously analyzing data from your email campaigns to understand what works and what doesn’t. | Use these insights to refine your segmentation, personalization, and overall strategy. |
Automation | Setting up automated email workflows based on specific triggers such as sign-ups, purchases, or user behavior. | Automation helps with timely and relevant communication by delivering the right message at the right time. |
While each of these can help make your email more targeted, it’s best to implement them all for maximum impact. Join us as we explain each of the strategies above.
Email List Segmentation
List segmentation is the process of dividing a larger group into smaller subgroups based on shared characteristics or criteria. In the context of email marketing, it involves splitting your email subscriber list into distinct segments.
Common bases for segmentation include:
Segmentation data | Examples |
---|---|
Demographics | Age, gender, location. |
Behavior | Past purchases, website activity. |
Psychographics | Interests, values, lifestyle. |
Customer lifecycle stage | Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Action, Loyalty. |
Engagement level with previous emails | Open rates, click rates, number of total clicks. |
You can use the data you collect to make emails more relevant in the following ways:
- Customize content: Send messages that appeal to the interests, needs, or behaviors of each segment.
- Send relevant offers: Segments allow you to create promotions or product recommendations that are more likely to appeal to specific groups.
- Time emails perfectly: You can time emails based on the typical habits of each segment.
- Lifecycle-specific messaging: Emails can be crafted to match where customers are in their journey with your brand.
- Language and tone adjustment: Adapt your writing style to best resonate with different segments, using more formal language for professional audiences and a casual email tone for younger demographics.
By making emails more relevant through segmentation, you can achieve improved engagement stats and lower unsubscribe rates.
The effectiveness depends on the data you collect — we cover this below.
What Segmentation Data to Collect for These Industries
Generic segmentation data is not enough; you should aim to collect more data on your customers so you can target them better. Below, the table lists 10 different industries and the data you can collect for each of them. With this data, your email campaigns can be more potent.
Industry | Data to collect for segmentation |
---|---|
E-commerce | Purchase history, Browsing behavior, Wishlist items, Preferred brands. |
Healthcare | Medical history, Appointment history, Insurance details, Preferred doctor. Note: Medical details must be obtained with explicit permission from patients. |
Education | Course progress, Enrollment history, Grading and performance. |
Real Estate | Course progress, Enrollment history, Grading, and performance. |
Finance | Travel preferences, Booking history, Preferred destinations, Budget. |
Travel | Vehicle preferences, Loan details, Purchase history, Service history. |
Retail | Purchase history, Browsing actions, Top brands reviewed, Wishlist items. |
Hospitality | Travel history, Room preferences, Loyalty program, if any. |
Automotive | Dining preferences, Visit frequency,Spend history, Birthdays/anniversaries. |
Restaurant | Dining preferences, Visit frequency, Spending history, Birthdays/anniversaries. |
Discussing email marketing ideas with other professionals in your industry can also introduce you to campaigns that use segmentation data creatively.
Email Personalization
When you tailor email content to individual subscribers based on their preferences, behaviors, and other personal information, it’s called email personalization. Personalization isn’t simply about referring to a recipient by their name; the goal is to harness the power of personal data and share content that resonates with them on a deeper level.
If you thought segmentation was powerful, personalization takes targeted email marketing a step further. While segmentation groups recipients based on shared characteristics, personalized emails focus on creating a one-on-one experience within each segment.
Targeted emails use personalization in more effective ways; here’s how:
- Detailed insights: Personalization allows email marketers to gather and utilize detailed insights about customer behaviors and preferences, which helps in creating more refined and accurate customer profiles. This in-depth knowledge enables highly targeted marketing efforts.
- Hyper-targeting: Instead of broad segments, personalization helps in creating micro-segments based on very specific criteria such as purchase frequency, average order value, or even browsing patterns. This fine-tuning ensures each micro-segment receives the most relevant content.
- Predict behavior: Using artificial intelligence, marketers can leverage the power of predictive analytics. It helps anticipate customer needs even before they are explicitly expressed. This proactive approach can significantly enhance the effectiveness of targeted marketing campaigns.
- Unified experience: When you collect customer data from emails, website activities, or app actions, you can craft a hard-hitting targeted email. Such personalized emails ensure the messaging is consistent with recipients’ recent behavior, making the marketing efforts more cohesive and effective.
- Value proposition: In a crowded market, personalized emails can help you stand out. By using personalization to send targeted emails, you can build a stronger connection with readers and capture a bigger market share.
You definitely can’t afford to ignore personalization — 59% of email marketers feel personalization is the best way to unlock engagement!
Content Relevance
Keeping your content highly relevant is the best strategy for targeted email marketing.
When you share emails that match the recipient’s current needs or search intent, it makes the content immediately useful. This can positively impact your engagement metrics and your conversion rates.
Your content strategy makes your emails more targeted in these ways:
- Accurate customer journey: By understanding the recipient’s journey, you can create emails that tell a story relevant to their stage in the buying process. This makes the communication feel more natural and engaging.
- Timely solutions: With the right content, you can address a pressing problem or opportunity for the recipient. This positions your product or service as the timely solution they need right now.
- Location-specific relevance: Creating content around the reader’s geographic location (such as local events, weather conditions, or regional trends) makes the email more pertinent to recipients based in those areas.
- Use marketing psychology: Understanding and applying psychological triggers such as urgency, social proof, and exclusivity in a relevant manner can significantly boost email performance by resonating with the recipient’s motivations.
- More than just a sales email: For complex products or services, relevant educational content can guide recipients through a learning pathway, making them more informed and confident in their purchase decisions.
- Collect more data: Incorporating email surveys, polls, and feedback requests can help you collect more information about subscribers’ preferences. This can help shape future targeted emails.
To expand on that last point, let’s examine the importance of data and its influence on your targeted email marketing strategy.
Analyze Your Campaign Metrics
Carefully examining your metrics can aid with targeted email marketing by helping you:
- Improve deliverability: For your targeted emails to work, they need rock-solid email deliverability — landing in the inbox instead of spam folders. Studying metrics helps identify issues with reaching the inbox.
- Refine your strategy: Your metrics can help you identify which email campaigns have performed best and understand the factors contributing to their success. This gives you an idea of what strategies to use in future campaigns.
- Achieve granular insights: Detailed analysis helps uncover nuanced behavioral patterns, such as specific times when recipients are more likely to engage or respond, enabling more precise targeting.
- Forecast trends: With historical data, you can create predictive models that forecast future behaviors and preferences.
- Better ROI: Metrics analysis provides a clear picture of the ROI for different campaigns, helping allocate budget and resources more effectively toward the most profitable strategies.
- Improve your sales funnel: Analyzing how recipients move through the conversion funnel helps you optimize each step of the journey, reducing drop-off rates and increasing conversions.
- Test segments: By breaking down the metrics of your segments, you can understand how different groups respond to your emails. This helps you implement effective segment-specific strategies, improving your targeted emails.
- Optimize A/B testing: A/B testing is critical to accurately targeting your subscribers, and what is it that influences these tests? Performance metrics!
- Content effectiveness: Is your content clicking with your audience? The only way to find out is to examine engagement stats. Your campaign metrics help you improve the quality and value of the emails you send.
Think of your metrics as a compass, helping you achieve better targeting. By listening to what your data is telling you, you understand your customers much better.
Automation
Email automation is the process of sending emails automatically based on pre-defined triggers or schedules. It takes the repetitive task of sending emails off your plate and optimizes communication with your audience.
Email automation allows you to send highly relevant messages at the perfect moment. And since it’s not humanly possible to keep an eye on thousands or even millions of potential leads, automation comes to the rescue.
Automation can help you ramp up your targeted campaigns with ease; here’s how:
- Instant response: Automation allows you to react immediately to customer actions, such as a welcome email when someone subscribes or an abandoned cart email shortly after a cart is left behind. This real-time interaction increases the impact of your emails.
- Behavioral triggers: Trigger emails can be activated by specific customer actions, such as browsing a particular product category or reaching a milestone in their customer journey.
- Makes marketing seamless: Automated workflows ensure customers receive a consistent and coherent series of emails that guide them through the sales funnel. From initial awareness to post-purchase follow-ups, automation can make your emails seem highly targeted.
- Handle volume: Automation enables you to scale your email marketing efforts without compromising on personalization. You can target thousands of recipients with tailored messages, something that would be impossible to do manually.
- Efficient and accurate targeting: Automated emails can be set up for different stages of the customer lifecycle, from nurturing new leads to re-engaging inactive customers. This dynamic engagement strategy can optimize your results.
- 360-degree approach: Automation allows you to integrate email marketing with other channels like SMS, social media, and web push notifications, creating a unified and targeted marketing strategy that meets the customers where they are.
That wraps up the strategies you need to get started on targeted email marketing. Next, we have great examples of targeted emails to help you get a clear idea of how well it works.
Targeted Emails: Examples
When you begin sending targeted emails, start slow. First work on segmentation, then set up your automation, work on your content, add personalization, and finally, study your metrics to see how it’s going.
Before you know it, you’ll be sending emails like the ones below!
Airtime Rewards
This email from Airtime Rewards demonstrates a great way to get a customer to continue using their services. It begins by sharing statistics that explain how the reader has benefited from the rewards program. To send this targeted email, Airtime pulled up customer-specific data and used dynamic content blocks to personalize emails for all the recipients of the email campaign.
Spotify
Spotify is an email marketing genius when it comes to targeted emails, and this example is no different. In this targeted email campaign, Spotify shares playlists created by using readers’ listening history.
The email works because of how personal it seems — people would happily click on the email to check out new songs.
Grammarly
Grammarly runs a targeted campaign here for its readers by sharing usage statistics. It’s a strategic move as the email makes the value proposition of buying a premium obvious. This message also makes it clear how critical Grammarly is to the reader’s daily activities, prompting them to consider returning the favor by buying a paid plan.
Google Maps
Google Maps is highly dependent on user-generated content for its Google Maps app. In this case, Google celebrates the contributions of readers by sharing how their photos and reviews have helped other users of the app.
The email also shares milestones unlocked by the recipient, which is a clever use of email gamification. The targeted email also sprinkles CTAs (calls to action) at various points, encouraging readers to click and contribute more to Google Maps.
FashionNova
Here is a great example of using browsing history/app behavior to convert a prospective customer. The email urges the recipient to continue shopping for a “little black dress” and shares options they may like. An email like this one can be highly persuasive for recipients on the fence about making a purchase.
That’s not all — the email even includes an email coupon to sweeten the deal. The coupon is only available if the reader submits a phone number, which is a smart way to collect additional data about the recipient and use it in a post-email SMS campaign.
Campaign Refinery: Target Subscribers With Surgical Precision
Campaign Refinery offers email marketers numerous tools to help them target their customers better.
- Segmentation: Our powerful segmentation and tagging features make it simple to create and manage multiple segments and move them through your marketing funnel.
- Audience Groups: Want to target two different segments simultaneously? With Audience Groups, you can group different segments and target them for the best results.
- Personalization: Our simple email editor lets you add merge variables with ease — now use merge variables to craft the most compelling personalized messages.
- Automation builder: Scared of complex automation flows? With our simple designer, you’ll fall in love with automation again.
- Gamification: We integrated gamification into Campaign Refinery because of its impact on engagement numbers. We’ve seen open rates of 76.37% and click rates of 72.76% on earlier campaigns.
- Campaign library: If you’re having trouble coming up with new ideas, check out the campaign library. Simply click and deploy.
- Smart Goal Triggers: Become a master of customer journeys with this powerful feature, which controls automation based on customer actions.
And the icing on the cake is that we have the best deliverability rates in the industry. Work on your campaigns and leave the inbox placement to us.
If you’re eager to experience elite email performance, apply to become a Campaign Refinery user today!