Your customers all shop differently. So the one-email-fits-all marketing won’t work if you want to keep an engaged and responsive audience. In fact, 53% of users hit the unsubscribe button due to getting too many irrelevant offers from brands. The surefire way to escape the same fate is by using a smart targeted strategy.

Today, our users are actively looking for a personalized customer experience. Targeted email marketing is a great way to respond to that need by ensuring that the messages those customers receive is always relevant.

What is targeted email marketing?

Targeted email marketing is sending specifically targeted and personalized email campaigns to subscribers based on their segmented characteristics, like profile data, behaviour, location, etc.

By segmenting your subscribers and sending targeted email campaigns, you can craft a more personalized message to go out to customers who fall into a certain segment. The more detailed your segments, the more personalized the message.

Targeted email marketing typically rubs shoulders with mailing list segmentation — an approach that divides your subscribers according to their gender, age, geography, occupation, preferences or so. With this information in mind, you’ll be able to target the right audience with the right content, stay a top-of-mind brand, and boost your sales.

Benefits of targeted email marketing:

You can only really harness that power if your emails are personalized. Think about it- no customer is going to be interested in a message that’s not relevant to them. Would you be?

By creating segments of your contacts, you’re giving yourself the opportunity to create more relevant messages tailored to those segments’ subscribers. This helps you build a relationship with those subscribers.

And it comes as no surprise that when you send people a relevant message, they’re more likely to engage with it. This means higher open, click through, and conversion rates.

What’s more- sending relevant messages can help stop subscribers from becoming inactive and improve customer retention.

Most importantly, it means a higher ROI from an already ROI-rich channel.

So let’s sum this up:

  • Segmenting allows you to send a more relevant message
  • Customers are going to be more interested in the message and engage more
  • Segmenting improves email ROI
  • Customers are less likely to become inactive and retain easier

Despite all of these clear benefits from using targeted email marketing, a whopping 51% of marketers don’t segment their email lists.

Apart from having high open rates, targeted email marketing has the following benefits for your business:

Relevancy:

Since targeted email campaigns bring content that resonates with the preferences and interests of a particular segment, recipients tend to remember your brand as a source of relevant and useful information.

Response:

When users get relevant offers from you, they are more likely to respond to them — by opening your emails, clicking your CTAs, and traveling to your website.

Revenue:

Targeted emails generate 36% of all revenue, so promoting your sales events or special offers to users who are prone to purchases is a bulletproof way to boost your income.

Bond:

Addressing your subscribers with targeted email marketing campaigns will show that you care about them and your every offer is carefully tailored right for their needs. This is a nice way to shape a thankful and loyal audience that will come back to buy more and spread a word about your brand within their social circle.

Retention:

According to statistics, your current customers are 50% more likely to try your new products compared to newcomers. On top of that, you already have the preferences of your subscribers’ list, so targeted emails are an easy way to maintain a strong company-customer bond going.

How to Create a Targeted Email Marketing Campaign

There are a few steps you’ll need to take when segmenting your subscribers for a targeted email campaign

Personalization as an email tactic

Email is likely you’re most powerful marketing tool as it boasts the highest ROI of any marketing channel from radio and TV commercials to PPC. What’s more: It converts 40X as many customers as social media.

Without personalization in your emails, however, your messages may go unread.

The reason: Customers respond to relevant messages targeted to them by name, featuring offers that are specific to their needs, and that connect with their current stage in the buyer’s journey. The numbers don’t lie when it comes to the effectiveness of personalization:

Emails with the recipient’s name in the subject line are 26% more likely to be read. — Experian

Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. — Aberdeen

81% of online shoppers who receive emails based on previous shopping habits were at least somewhat likely to make a purchase as a result of targeted email. — EMarketer

Getting started with personalization

When you’re ready to get serious about email personalization, there are two initial steps to take for best results.

  1. Ask the right questions, get the right data

This should be your mantra when it comes to collecting customer information. At the end of the day, your email targeting will only be as good as the information you plug into it. In most cases, the best place to collect customer information is in your subscribe forms.

Think about what information you need to effectively customize your emails–and be sure to ask for it in the signup form. 

  1. Integrate your existing ecommerce platform and CRM

Integrating your ecommerce platform and CRM with your email platform means you can broaden your multi-channel marketing strategy. These powerful tools allow you to market holistically to a complete customer profile–not just to a line on a spreadsheet.

For example: You can integrate your campaign with selling platforms like Shopify to further customize your emails for customers in VIP loyalty programs.

  1. Making an email targeted

We now know that even simple personalized touches like using the recipient’s name can have a dramatic impact on open and click through rates. But that’s only the beginning. With tools like Campaign Monitor, you can customize every part of an email and make targeting a key ingredient to your overall marketing strategy.

Here are a few targeting tactics for building out an email with maximum relevance and resonance to your customers.

  1. Targeting by location

What’s that picture of the New York City skyline doing in the background of the email you send out to customers in London?

For the same reason you want to call customers by the right name, you should choose images that reflect their locations. It turns out that a personalized image based on the recipient’s location can lead to a 29% increase in click-throughs compared to a generic image.

  1. Targeting by gender

Relevance goes a long toward building trust. Once you’re over the hurdle of just getting someone to open your email, you’ll want to make sure the content is relevant to the reader. Irrelevant emails get deleted and often prompt recipients to unsubscribe or report spam.

One way to be more relevant is to take the recipient’s gender into account. By displaying different offers and copy based on demographics with what’s known as dynamic content, you can see how brands like Adidas master relevance within a single campaign.

Keep in mind that your demographic targeting will only be as good as your subscriber data. If you have customers’ shoe sizes, you can even target based on that.

  1. Targeting via custom fields

Use custom fields to integrate any and all information you have about your customers into a campaign. Personalization tags make it easy to customize any part of the email copy.

You might send a thank you email featuring their first name in the copy, for example. (Don’t worry: B2B users can ensure that the recipient’s company is mentioned by name in the body of the email, too.)

  1. Targeting via purchase behaviour

One of the most powerful targeting tools is targeting by purchase behaviour. It’s a win-win feature that, if used well, translates to a more sales for you, and greater satisfaction for your customers. By taking purchasing behaviour into account you can better reach customers based on where they are in the buyer’s journey, and maybe give them a little nudge into the next stage.

A timely deal might motivate someone to buy who’s been considering a purchase.

Re-engagement can turn one-time buyers into return customers.

A deadline (like a limited time offer) can encourage them to make a decision.

 

Wrap up

Email targeting uses customer data to create the kind of personal touch that has been proven to boost clicks and increase revenue. Using a few simple steps, you can design emails to reach the right person at the right time with a message they will actually read. The Power of Email Personalization to Reach Humans Learn how to use dynamic content to personalize your campaigns and improve your open and click-through rates.

These steps were brought to you by Adstuck, which also provides targeted email marketing services to its clients.

Adstuck:

Adstuck is a digital marketing practice agency working from all over the world with four locations India, Singapore, Estonia and US. Its mission is to provide instant access to a talented workforce to enterprise. They have 491 clients and worked over 700 projects, with 30 fortunes 500 firms.

Adstuck provide services in:

  • Improving marketing results
  • Creating social media marketing strategy
  • Proper assessments of current trends
  • Market research
  • Email designing
  • Campaign creation
  • Growing market share
  • Email marketing
  • Launching new product or enter new market.

It is a strong and leading digital media marketing service provider which can help you with cost cutting, plan execution, perfect reporting, strategy making, data collecting, and response collection from consumers. It handles all the aspects of your business. They don’t focus only on new on emerging brands who wants entail success and distribution in the market but also on brands that have successfully established the customer retail space, and need some assistance in managing their business.

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