A Guide to Hitting the Bull's Eye With Targeted Email Marketing

The following blog post will cover how you can use targeted email marketing to reach your audience with specific messages that they want to hear. We'll also discuss how you can create targeted customer segments for each campaign and then build custom content specifically tailored for them. Finally, we'll discuss the types of email marketing you can adopt.

What Is a Targeted Email?

Targeted email marketing is the approach of sending emails to customers with information, deals, or promotional offers that are personalized based on their demographics, interests, geographic location, or previous customer behavior.

A targeted email campaign allows marketers to increase the overall impact of their messaging by delivering more relevant content to their subscribers. Because it is so easy for our target audience to ignore us online, we need to make sure we are engaging them as much as possible by making every effort count.

Is Targeted Email Marketing Effective?

People who have opted in to receive emails from a company are likely to be interested in the business's products or services. Repeated exposure to targeted email campaigns has been shown to increase customer loyalty, brand awareness, website traffic, and sales conversions. Studies show that targeted email campaigns generate 50% more CTRs than non-targeted emails. With these statistics, it is clear that marketers will get better results when they send out relevant information than when they mass-market content to different groups of people.

Why Do I Need To Send Targeted Emails?

While creating an email list is now easier than ever before, marketers must remember that not all subscribers are created equally. Many businesses forget about this aspect, and they send out their marketing campaign to anyone who has opted-in at some point in time. They fail to look deeper into the demographics of the people on their email list and thus fail to increase sales or brand awareness through targeted email marketing.

Businesses will miss out on countless opportunities if they only view new customers as one set group instead of looking closer at each person within that group.

The most important benefits of email targeting include:

1. Increased customer engagement and loyalty
   
2. Improved ROI from marketing expenditure
   
3. More relevant content for subscribers
   
4. Greater insight into customer behavior
   

The purpose of targeted email marketing is exactly as it sounds: delivering relevant campaign messages to specific subscribers. Whether you're trying to drive traffic back to your website, increase SEO rankings, or strengthen customer loyalty, you should only send out information that your target audience wants and needs; otherwise, you run the risk of wasting time and resources. This is where segmentation and personalization play a vital role in marketing efforts.

Types of Targeted Email Campaigns

There are several different types of targeted email campaigns that you can focus on, each with its own set of goals. Here are a few popular examples:

Geo-Targeted Emails

Targeted email marketing can also be based on geographical location. For example, you could have a restaurant in Ottawa, Canada, and want to target customers within the city limits with offers only valid for one week. Or you could run an email campaign offering discounts to people who've signed up from specific postal codes to drive online sales at your brick-and-mortar store. Geo-targeted emails save you time by not sending messages that subscribers living 20 km away won't care about. The more targeted the message, the better chance there is of receiving a response (i.e., clicks through to your website, product purchases, or other desired actions).

Going back to our earlier example of running an online store, collecting data from website visitors through surveys or opt-in forms can help you create geo email targeting. You can then segment your audience by state, province, region, or postal code.

Interests & Preferences in Targeted Emails

If you send the same email to everyone on your email list, you'll quickly find that response rates will decrease. Instead of wasting your time and money sending messages that aren't relevant to many subscribers, create targeted emails around specific interests or preferences. For example, a local bookstore could run a holiday promotion for customers who've signed up for their newsletters using an opt-in form online.

By creating targeted content based on subscriber interests, you can improve engagement and increase sales. If done right, interest-based email campaigns can become a powerful tool for strengthening customer relationships and boosting ROI.

A tactic that works well with interest-targeted email marketing is offering exclusive deals or discounts based on a subscriber's interests, location, or past purchases. The more you know about your customers, the easier it will be for you to create highly targeted emails that they'll want to open.

Suppose you want to send an email promoting a new book by one of your most popular authors, but the publication date is still months away. Instead of waiting until the launch date arrives, you can now promote it to subscribers who are fans of this particular author or have bought books they have written in the past. You'll be able to achieve high response rates and sales if you identify which emails are likely to perform well with various segments of your list based on interest, purchase history, or past behavior.

The more targeted your content, the higher engagement will be, so don't waste time sending generic newsletters. Each message should contain information relevant only to customers who have engaged with your business in a particular way.

Behavior Targeted Emails

Behavior targeted emails are emails that have been targeted towards a certain group of people based on their buying habits, interests, purchase frequency, or other interactions. For example, if you want to send an email about your latest business book to all subscribers who've signed up for your mailing list, collect specific information about them through opt-in forms and surveys over the years, collect transactional data (purchase history), and so on. If there is enough information collected from customers' past activities, behaviorally targeted emails can become highly effective in sales.

Customer Lifecycle Targeted Emails

Customer lifecycle targeted emails have been sent to customers at different points in their relationship with your business. They can be broken down into five main categories:
1) Prospects: These are people who have never interacted with your business before.
2) Engaged prospects: These are people who have interacted with your business but haven't bought anything from you yet.
3) Customers: These are people who have bought something from you.
4) Repeat customers: These are people who have bought something from you more than once.
5) Loyal customers: These are people who have bought something from you multiple times and have a high lifetime value.

Customer lifecycle email targeting aims to move customers through the different customer lifecycle stages by providing them with relevant content at the right time.

How To Create Targeted Emails: A Step by Step Guide

One of the most important steps involved with targeted email campaigns is the creation of highly targeted campaigns. With these small lists, you can create more personalized messages that will be more relevant to each subscriber's interests. Relevancy is key when it comes to email marketing – if subscribers don't find your content interesting or useful, they're likely to unsubscribe and ignore your future messages.

When you take the time to create targeted email campaigns, you're increasing the chances that each message will be read and acted upon. This increased engagement will help you achieve your desired results, whether you want increased website traffic, stronger customer loyalty, or higher sales conversions. When done correctly, targeted email marketing can be an extremely effective way to reach out to potential and current customers alike.

To create a successful email targeting campaign, follow these steps:

1. Determine Which Audience Segments You Need

The first step in creating a highly targeted email campaign is determining which audience segments you need to target. This involves looking at your existing customer base and dividing it into smaller groups based on interests, demographic factors, or other marketable variables.

2. Gather the Data To Segment Your Audience

The next step is to gather the data to segment your audience. This involves using surveys, opt-in forms, lead capture forms, etc., to learn about their preferences and behavior.

A simple way of doing this is by looking at their activity or recent purchases. You can find out what products/services/offers they interact with by tracking where they click on your website or which pages they view.

3. Integrate a CRM and Email Platform With Your Website

To ensure the quality of your targeted emails, it's important to integrate a CRM and email platform with your website. This will allow you to keep track of all customer data and make sure it is updated and synchronized across the platforms. This will help avoid any discrepancies in customer data and improve your chances of converting leads into customers.

4. Study the Segments and Create Targeted Content

Create email campaigns that are highly targeted to each segment. If you know what offers or information will interest them, you can put together an email campaign with this as the focus. However, if you don't have much knowledge about your subscribers, it may be a good idea to use split testing to determine which incentive is most likely to convert into a purchase or lead.

5. Test and Analyze Your Targeted Emails

You must test and analyze your emails before sending them out. You can either run a split test or send the campaign to a smaller group of people first to see what kind of engagement it receives before sending it on to more segments. This will help you decide if anything is wrong with the email design or offer, so you don't waste time and money delivering poor content.

The final step in ensuring the quality of email targeting is to use analytics to measure success, refine your strategy, and keep in touch with subscribers. As time goes on and you learn what works best for different segments, make sure that you update your email campaigns to reflect this. Additionally, subscriber engagement (e.g., opens, clicks and conversions) should be measured regularly to determine the effectiveness of your current strategy and make necessary changes if required.

How To Measure the Effectiveness of Targeted Emails

You can calculate the conversion rate of targeted emails by pinpointing the conversion source. Some tools that can help you do it are:

1. UTM tags in your targeted emails;
2. Specific phone numbers used by customers to contact you;
3. Specific words that help you understand where the customer comes from (e.g., promo codes).

One more option is to analyze the performance of targeted email campaigns by setting up parameters in an email tracking system — for example, you can see open or click rates in Google Analytics. Also, ESPs often allow you to do a deeper analysis of your email performance.

Conclusion

Targeted email marketing is a great way to improve converting leads into customers. By following the steps mentioned above, you can ensure that the quality of your targeted emails is up to par and that they are helping you achieve your business goals.

Following are the key takeaways for your next targeted email:

1. Use the data you have about your customers to personalize their shopping experience by sending them relevant, timely, and engaging emails.
   
2. Test different email content formats and variations to see what resonates best with your subscribers and moves people through the customer lifecycle.
   
3. Keep it simple. The message needs to be relevant and interesting enough for your customers to want to click on it so they can learn more.
   

When you have followed these steps successfully, your business will have created a relationship with your targeted audience that allows them to trust your brand.