Targeting marketing through your email campaign is about making it more relevant to your clients. There are a number of ways you can do this simply and effectively.
As you start to do this you need to think about what your subscribers want from your email communications. The answer is essentially relevant offers or useful information at the right time.
Stage 1: Planning
Spend a little time analysing your email list and ways that you could segment it into groups to improve communication relevance for at least some offers. The groups you choose will be dependent on your business and smaller, resource light businesses will need to look at only a few segments in order to maximise impact with minimal effort. Here are some examples of segments you may find useful:
- Lifecycle stages – Prospect; New Customer; Regular Customer; Loyal Customer
- Preferences – such as location; products; online vs in-store shoppers
- Customer types – considered purchasers vs impulse buyers (bigger ticket items tend to be more considered)
- Product preferences – have you any purchase information you can easily feed into your database such purchase regularity, sale products only,
- Product type (e.g. beauty vs hair )
Stage 2: Data
How do you provide relevant communications to the different groups whilst minimising the time taken to do so since you are no doubt a very busy person. The majority of email providers have some form of dynamic (changeable) content option based on a data field but for this you must have the data you need.
In many cases simply adding a field on sign up with a few drop down options can help you tailor content (e.g. Do you prefer to shop online or in-store? / Are you a hair or beauty client? / Are you a current client?). A drop down box makes the process of sending easier as the data value will be consistent.
For existing subscribers send an email telling them you want to increase email relevance for them and include a link to a form with that field on. That will also help you know who is truly engaging with your emails.
Stage 3: Content tailoring
You don’t have to do entirely different emails for each group. Often the vast majority of the email can be made relevant to everyone with some carefully placed dynamic content. Dynamic content is content which changes (is dynamic) based on a specific data field. There are a number of things you can consider such as brand or location specific offers. In general the format will be something like:
If client type is [beauty] include [skincare offer]
If client type is [hair] include [ colouring offer]
If relationship is [client] include [ loyalty offer]
If relationship is [interested] include [first purchase offer]
Also remember to include default content for where the field hasn’t been completed or has data which doesn’t match any of your selections. Despite your best efforts data can still get corrupted.
Stage 4: Analysis
Don’t forget to look at the email reports and see what offers are most popular for most groups.
Tip!
You can also use dynamic content to test different kinds of offer (e.g. percentage off vs money off) on a smaller segment or for future campaigns.
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Julie Joseph is owner of JJ Consulting. She has 20 years sales and marketing experience including 15 years focused on Digital Marketing. She has worked with clients across many sectors including major players from Media, Retail, Transport and Finance and presented at various industry events. Please see www.facebook.com/jjconsultinguk for more information.
Image courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
