As technology continues to increase, improve and enhance, messaging continues to bombard our target audiences at every angle. Staying in front of your audience helps them remember you in a time of need, but there is also a deep rooted need for relationships both personally and professionally. Your audience wants relevant, personalized, and authentic experiences from the companies they engage with and you can achieve that by following these 5 strategies:
1. Segment your audience
While it’s not a new idea, segmenting your audience is very important for email campaigns to be successful. To segment your audience means to divide people into subgroups based upon different criteria so that they will receive more personalized emails. While it’s not the most exciting task to look at your database and segment our audience that fits your business, sending out the right message to the right consumer is what makes email campaigns effective.
2. Analyze your data
Most of us would probably rather be out building relationships in person than being stuck analyzing data behind a computer, but this is such a crucial part of email campaigns. Take note of what type of content your audience is into based on the engagement you get and will help you send out the right type of messaging. Do you get more engagement from more personal emails, informational emails, or product offerings? Analyzing the right type of messaging that gets the most engagement will reach a broader audience. For a more advanced tip, integrate your data points and key performance indicators (KPIs) from email blasts with your website analytics. Tracking behavior patterns of how people are engaging by clicking links that go to your website, services provided, or downloading information can be useful to see the flow of what people are doing during and after reading your emails.
3. Nurture and engage your current audience
Give your audience the best experience possible. Starting with the understanding that you have your own avid audience or circle of influence. Whether it is 5, 10, or 100 people, set those people apart and communicate in a way that resonates with them. If you’re consistently nurturing your avid audience base, they will be dedicated to let everyone know about your brand and how amazing it is, and in return will increase your referrals and word of mouth marketing.
4. Utilize automated emails
Automated emails will save you time and energy by streamlining your responses in different situations. Examples of utilizing automated email would be a followup to a prospective client after a meeting, a welcome email to someone who signed up with your company, or a thank you email after a sale. Having templates set up for automated emails that are sent at the right time builds engagement and shows your commitment to communicating with your audience.
5. Discover your strengths and weaknesses through A/B testing
If you’re unfamiliar with A/B testing, it simply means that you send one email to a certain group of people and another one to a separate group and compare how well it does. Things to test would be subject lines, call to actions, photos, videos, more content, less content, ect. This will help your email campaigns be more effective in the long run by nurturing your audience in ways they can relate to.
Don’t overthink email campaigns – keep it simple and straight forward by communicating information of product/service offerings in bite-size pieces to entice them to take the next step in the sales process.