As an entrepreneur, building successful and personalized email marketing campaigns could be vital to your brand’s success.
If you thought email marketing was a thing of the past, think again. Yes, everything in the present day seems to be about likes, shares, tweets and status updates. However, nothing is more personalized and convincing than an email that’s engaging and relevant.
Here are 5 ways in which you can better personalize your email marketing, for increased effectiveness.
- Obtain relevant lead intelligence
You have, no doubt, spent hours trying to generate leads and trying to convert those leads into clients or customers. However, you may be faced with the challenge of knowing nothing more than the name and email address of these leads. This information is insufficient to nurture your lead into a client, which is why you need sufficient lead intelligence.
Lead intelligence comprises information that you obtain from various sources like social media, website analytics and CRM, which makes you more aware about your lead, before following-up with them. You can personalize your email marketing campaigns and craft compelling content only if you have accurate and quality lead information.
Forms are essential to capturing relevant leads. Your form strategy should capture key information that sheds light on the contact’s persona (a representation of your ideal client) and funnel stage (his/her position in the buyer’s journey). However, look beyond forms and add to this information by conducting lead enrichment whenever you connect with a contact to help you fill gaps in data. There are various tools that can help you with lead enrichment, and help you keep the information updated.
- Use smart email workflows
Once you have a rich database of lead intelligence, you can put that information to good use. You can start drafting an email workflow – a series of automated emails that you will send in response to behaviour or contact information. These emails are specially crafted to spark action, which is not limited to only converting leads to customers. They could help you delight existing customers, encourage them to buy something more or something more expensive, or spread the word about your brand.
Your tools and goals for your personalized email marketing campaign will define the contents of the email workflow, so tailor the emails to target specific personas. This will steeply increase the open and click rate of your emails. Demographic information and purchase history also help streamline your emails to target audiences.
- Create smart lists
Not everyone who visits your website has the same purpose or wishes to receive the same content in email. So, instead of having a single list of subscribers, have segmented lists based on various factors, like your target personas, industry, lifecycle stage, level of engagement etc. So let’s say you have two target personas. You will need to craft two sets of persona-specific variations of your emails in a single campaign workflow.
These smart lists will keep adding new leads to the established workflow on basis of the list criteria, thereby automatically introducing them to the relevant email marketing campaigns.
- Get the timing right
Timing is vital to the performance of an email campaign. Sending your personalized emails at the right time can, in fact, dramatically increase your open and click rates. To ensure that time zones do not affect performance, you could schedule your email to be sent at a time when your contact is most likely to open it. Another aspect to this includes how timely and relevant the offer you’re promoting is.
- Evaluate and re-evaluate
There is no formula for success that you can apply to your personalized email marketing campaigns. In fact, what works for one persona may not work for another. But what you can do is to evaluate the results of your past campaigns and see what worked and what didn’t – and learn from them. Examine metrics like open rate, click-through rate, lost contacts etc. and try to find surges and dips in engagement levels and key discriminating factors. Compare campaigns to see why one worked better than the other. Check out differences in content, timing, subject lines, number of emails etc. and correlate with the aforementioned metrics.
Monitor ongoing campaigns to keep track of their performance and make the necessary tweaks. Also, try not to compare campaigns where the results are not comparable. And always, keep learning from your previous campaigns and put that learning into new ones, keeping your end goal in mind.
At Them You & Me, we help you with digital marketing strategies to streamline your digital efforts. Do give us a call if you think you’d like some guidance in personalizing your email marketing campaign.
Digitally yours,
Marie
This content was inspired by an informative article that can be found here.
