Email marketing reaches your customers, builds relationships, and make sales happen. But it doesn't work well if you don't understand your audience, their needs, and their wants. Because to help your audience better understand how your service or product can help them, you yourself need to first know whom you're talking to.
This article outlines steps you need to take to to learn more about your audience so that you can then segment them and improve your email workflow—and conversions.
Their Behaviors
One of the most important things to know about your customers is their behaviors. In other words, how often or how little they buy from you, as well as how much they spend each time and what they buy.
A customer who buys from you frequently but spends little each time requires a message different from one for a customer who buys from you once every six months—but spends a lot of money each time. Those two customers, both, might like your company and the products or services you offer, but they're interested in different ones and have different reasons for buying.
Once you understand your target audience's behaviors on a granular level, you can then work out an email workflow that (a) targets them with the right content/message and (b) targets them at the right time (including, for example, when to send emails—what day, what time of day, etc.).
Moreover, you can also create more buyer personas when you learn more about customer behavior. For example, you might have "regular customers," "first-time buyers," "prospective buyers," "loyal customers," "discount customers," and other personas.
Their Location
Location matters because it will have a bearing on how you tweak your email workflow. For example, once you know the location of your audience, you can then create time-based emails that are sent out at optimum times.
But you can also target specific customers with regional promotions and even carry out live webinars that help specific customers in specific locations to learn more about your company and your products and services.
There's also a tactical bonus: Once you've uncovered your audience's location, you can add it to your email subject lines. Around 47% of emails are opened just because they had attention-grabbing subject lines; customizing a subject line with geographic information will get your reader's attention.
Their Preferences
All the people who signed up to your email list are clearly interested in your company, but that doesn't mean they all have the exact same preferences regarding what they want to see in their emails.
Some customers might prefer to receive only news and deals in their inbox, while others might want to see news, deals, promotions, and contests.
When you learn more about each customer's preference, you're able to send information that's relevant to them—and nothing else or extraneous. This improves communications, and it means there's less chance they'll unsubscribe.
A direct way to learn more about your customers' preferences is to send them an email that asks them what kind of emails they want to receive. Among their options could be...
- All the news and deals (everything!)
- In-store promotions and sales only
- Online promotions and sales only
- New products only
Of course, those are just examples; the options you present depend on the particulars of your company.
You can go further. In addition to understanding the types of emails they'd like to receive from you, you can also delve into their personal interests.
