Targeted email marketing: segmentation and personalization

Email marketing is a business that should base first of all on trust and voluntary agreement of subscribers to get advertising emails and promotional messages. The only means to reach the customer’s consciousness and build trust is message you email to them and subscription form.

Simple steps to build trust

• The abundance of information a prospective subscriber should fill in form may only frighten him/her. You don’t have to ask for everything at the beginning. More data you will be able to collect after a greater trust will be built.
• Send only information you’ve promised to send, otherwise your emailing could be considered an annoying one and fresh subscribers will be more likely to unsubscribe.
• Try to fulfill every desire your subscriber expressed, rather to get HTML messages or text-only messages or how often and with what kind of content inside. These facts are all count on. And the better you reflect their choices the better responses you will get.
• Try to create highly personalized messages.
• Sometimes it may happen the subscriber’s preferences have changed. Try to survey them from time to time, or just add to the standard email message something new and catchy, that your subscriber may like.

Behavioral-based segmentation

To use this kind of segmentation you need to track your subscribers’ actions: you should pay close attention to who of your recipients opens or not the email messages, and if opens what link chooses to follow. To obtain a general image of behavioral preferences of your subscribers you can include special surveys into your bulk mailings and analyze the results. Determination of groups by preferences is one of the main clues as to the well managed targeted email marketing campaign.

Demographic segmentation

To organize email advertising oriented on high sales you should consider the needs of particular customer, bearing in mind the age, sex and other demographic data about him/her. The idea of such targeting is lying in dividing the whole email marketing list into different groups taking in consideration customers’ first choices depending on their sex, age, marital status, etc. it often may happen that the same person can be presented in several groups.

A special part of your mailing list you should remember of is the AOL subscribers. You should create special email messages for them:

• Use short subject lines and beware of fancy phrases, using instead of them more conservative ones.
• Prepare separate versions of your email message in HTML, Text and RTF (Rich Text Format) formats allowing subscribers to choose a proper variant for them.

Inactive subscribers also should be paid special attention on considering their retargeting. Some steps you may undertake to re-engage inactive subscribers are as following:

• Update subscriber’s data (demographic, preferences etc.)
• Try to propose them special offers.
• Try to find out proper time/day and frequency to send email messages to concrete person.
• Try to change the content of your message, experiment with the subject line.
• Let people chose the right format of your email message.
• Send inactive subscribers’ postcards.

Email personalization

Your subscribers are likely to appreciate your attention. The personalization is one of ways to show you care about them. To make them positive to you try to give all the necessary information so that they could decide on their own what kind of advertising and news to get or what kind of information about them to provide to you. They have to have the possibility to update the personal data and preferences, the same as they have permanent to unsubscribe option.

Bear in mind, a lot of subscribers use “family” email addresses, which can be confusing in cases when one family member doesn’t know about another family member’s desire to subscribe to your direct emailing. In such cases you should include extra information into your confirmation message, such as whom the message is addressed to and so on. To avoid deleting your message by mistake, try to send confirmation email as soon as it possible.

The mane source of personalization is your customer data. It can be used to create highly personalized email messages. The minimal personalization presupposes addressing the customer by the first name, but the higher personalization is the greater volume of responses you get. Even the process of personalization takes some time it definitely worth it. You can start the personalization of your email messages involving 1-2 variables and add other variables if needed

Friday, September 10th, 2010 : Email Marketing : No Comments