Effective Email Marketing Begins with Knowing Your Customers

If you’re in the business of sending emails, you may already know for every $1 spent, an estimated $39 is gained. That’s an amazing rate of return that shows not only the cost-efficiency of the medium itself, but also its effectiveness.

Yet it takes effort to realize these gains. You can have the best email list and the best email design, but this will only take you so far. If you want to have real success in your email marketing campaigns, you need to know your customers.

Knowing Your Customers

Gone are the days of batch and blast. Today’s successful email marketers create personalized, relevant messages for their targeted audience to achieve greater engagement and response.

Take, for example, a new promotional offer. If a customer has already shown interest in the blue suede shoes you have on sale, give him a little extra push (like sending a free shipping offer) to make that purchase. But what if you are trying to rein in new customers? New website visitors are likely to be less familiar with your products, and you don’t have the transactional or behavioral history to determine their interests.

In this case, appending demographic, interest and purchase data to new email addresses can provide the intelligence needed to craft a relevant offer. If you’re selling shoes and learn that a new subscriber is 26 years old and lives in Brooklyn, it makes sense to show him Converse sneakers instead of Johnston & Murphy wingtips. Behavioral tracking works great for long-term subscribers, but email enhancement allows you to cater to the needs and wants of new subscribers, thereby making a great first impression and boosting conversion rates.

There is no generic, one-size-fits-all email that works for everyone. You must employ segmentation in your campaigns, categorize your lists and send the right emails accordingly.

Determining What Your Customers Want

To be effective, the focus of your messaging needs to be on what’s important for the customer, not the company. One great way to find out what your customers want is to send out a survey. If you truly want to get your customers’ feedback, make them a special offer for completing your survey-perhaps a discount on their next purchase.

Of course, actions speak louder than words, and observing buyer behavior can provide a wealth of information about your customers. What do they search for? What website pages do they view? What products do they put in their shopping carts? Use these behavioral signals to design content and offers that address your visitors’ interests.

Your personalized content will be even more effective if you know the context for those behaviors. Demographics, whether from a survey or a service, can provide that. If Amazon.com sees someone purchase a Little Mermaid video, its recommendations and follow on offers would yield a greater response if it takes into account whether the customer is a father buying for his daughter or a girl in college who simply loves Disney.

The bottom line? Know your customers. Good marketing cannot be delivered in an information vacuum, and the best email creative in the world will not help if you’re sending irrelevant offers to your subscribers.

Want to see how you can benefit from more customer data? Click below to get your free Email Intelligence match report!