Most businesses understand the importance of emails in their business marketing. Far from dying in the wake of social media emails are here for the foreseeable future.
Email marketing has moved on a pace and if you’re serious about growing your business you need to be serious about slicing and dicing your data
Email segmentation and tailoring the content in your emails to those individual groups of contacts can improve the results of your marketing campaign significantly. For small businesses in particular it is a clever way to show clients that they care and understand their client’s needs.
Still need convincing? Here’s the data to prove it:
Mailchimp recorded that on average, segmented campaigns result in 23% higher open rates and 49% higher click through rates than unsegmented campaigns. Hubspot have created marketing stats for 2020 and report that marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
Open rates increase customer engagement which drive more sales. Any business is crazy to ignore those figures!
Email Segmentation
Working out the best way to segment your email campaigns can be a huge undertaking. Here are a few tips to make it a little more manageable.
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Demographics
The age, gender or company position can tell a lot about a person’s interests and needs. The more information you gather from someone in the sign up process will offer more options for demographic segmentation.
A word of warning: asking for too much information can put people off signing up at all. A balance is required to ensure that it does not have a negative affect on your sign up rate. Look at your business and see if there are clear priorities that can help you decide what information to ask for. For example if you are a clothing retailer, then gender would be useful to know.
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Email engagement
Email engagement is a simple way to categorise your lists but it can have significant results. Use information about your subscriber’s open rate to differentiate between those who frequently engage compared to those who have less contact.
Categorise active engagers as ‘interested’ parties and develop campaigns targeted at converting sales.
If subscribers have been inactive for a little while you can create specialised campaigns designed at re-engaging your dormant subscribers.
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Geographical location
This is particularly useful for businesses where location greatly influences purchasing decisions. As such it can be used in different ways.
By selecting regions targeted emails can inform clients about events in their area. Alternatively emails can be staggered to be sent at optimum times for clients in varying time zones.
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Position in the Sales Funnel
Segmenting your clients based on their position in the sales process is a valuable tool. Someone at the top of the sales funnel should be receiving a different message than those at the bottom.
New clients need to be nurtured whereas returning customers need alternative messages offering upselling. In essence every stage in the sales funnel should have its own unique email marketing campaign.
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Age
Internet access these days is ageless. You could be emailing a retired person, a business manager or a student. Knowing the general age range of your list will allow you to remove those that do not fall in to your target audience. Alternatively you can tailor your messaging to the different age ranges that you are targeting.
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Preferences
It is important to market to clients based on their preferences. Ask clients when signing up how often they wish to receive emails or to choose the type of emails they want to be sent. Would they prefer blogs post updates, offers, important dates, podcasts, webinars or all of the above? A recent HubSpot Research survey, highlighted that 54% of respondents wanted to see more video content in the future. This type of feedback is valuable. If you know the preferences of certain segments of your list prefer you can deliver content in your emails in their preferred format.
Offering subscribers the chance to update their frequency preferences when they opt to ‘unsubscribe’ in an email has proven to reduce the numbers of those that actually click to opt out.
There are many more ways to dissect your data but overcomplicating the information that you retain can be cumbersome to use. It is far better to think strategically about the segmentations that work best for your business. Once these are identified you can put in place ways of collecting this data.
GDPR
GDPR requires businesses to be more careful about the data that they hold and how they use it for marketing purposes. Clients are not going to want to wade through a shopping list of questions in order to give their consent to be added to your mailing list.
However GDPR does encourage businesses to offer multiple options to subscribers. By offering subscribers choices on how often they receive communication and in what format, you are giving the subscribers control of how they hear from you. Don’t be put off if a client wants to hear from you a little less. You can send an email out to 100,000 clients and get a low percentage open rate. If your audience has specified how and when they want to hear from you, your click rate is likely to increase significantly.
Our inboxes are cluttered every day with emails that we fail to open and stick in our junk box. On average a person receives around 120 emails a day. As email marketing develops customers’ email addresses will need to be reserved for personalised and highly targeted content.
Businesses who fail to deliver on this – whup – the ‘unsubscribe’ box gets ticked. Nail it and it is a great way to cut through the inbox noise and develop an effective marketing campaign with the potential to have great results.
Getting Started
There are numerous software systems out there to support your email marketing strategy. It is not necessarily difficult for organisations to handle email marketing in-house as long as they choose the right software to suit their business.
Before launching an email marketing campaign it’s important to have a strong understanding of your short and long-term goals. Is this something that you plan to do regularly or on a more infrequent basis? It is also important to think about the type of date that you want to track.
Once you set your goals, you can determine if you have the time and resource to handle this in-house or whether you need to get extra support to accomplish your goals.
Finding The Time
Small business are less likely to have specialist expertise in-house. Additional they are likely to be juggling many different hats – be it the accountant, the lawyer, the sales person, the admin person and the marketing person. In essence you simply might not have sufficient time to focus on email marketing and segmentation.
Be honest with yourself – does your team have the time to focus on email marketing? Its success depends on the amount of time and effort you put into it. A growing business juggling multiple projects simply many not have the bandwidth to focus on another project.
Outsourcing can allow you and your team to focus on their core business and marketing tasks.
Conclusion
Using an email marketing service, and a touch of creativity, you can start targeting your audience using segmentation strategies.
If you recognise that you need to implement email marketing into your overall strategy but simply don’t have the time or the technical skills then Buy Time have a number of executive assistants who can help your business develop an effective marketing campaign.
Buy Time
Buy time have been providing support for over 15 years to SMEs, entrepreneurs, growing start-ups, professionals and private individuals. Experts at what they do, many of our executive assistants stem from a background within blue-chip, multinational organisations. Some have come from entrepreneurial careers themselves. They are able to flex with your requirements; providing more or less hours as necessary and delivering a cost effective solution.
Our focus is our client. We therefore offer a flexible and transparent pricing structure, with no membership, contract or joining fees. There are no minimum use requirements – simply ‘buy time’ as it is needed. We support businesses starting out on their journey as well as more established organisations. Many have continued: our long-term relationships have benefited from this approach for well over a decade.
Please contact us on info@buy-time.co.uk to discuss in more detail how we can support your business growth.