Why Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns Win Customers Over
If you already have a job slaying away for someone else, a regular paycheck is at the end of that tunnel. But there’s no light in personal security by helping your boss get rich.
Maybe you work from your residence as a stay-at-home mom or dad. Perhaps you’re a recent college graduate, trying to find a way into the perfect first career in an office that barely pays you enough to make tuna pasta for supper.
Whatever your life situation, there’s a personal dream for something more.
Success Breeds Success Online through Content Strategy
Most of us want to do better but haven’t figured out a way to get there. For many, setting up a source of ongoing passive income is the ticket to financial independence and freedom to live life the way you choose. Without having deep pockets of endless cash to fund your business idea, the-next-best-thing-since-sliced-bread no doubt, how could you possibly get started?
Just do what business enterprise does.
According to a recent survey by UK accounting firm Moore Stephens, American companies dedicated 23 percent of their advertising budgets to digital marketing last year. This is a major increase from the previous year, when just 16 percent of marketing budgets were going toward attracting new customers online.
But why are these facts important to your livelihood?
It’s a clue as to where you need to be in finding a source of secondary income, right where you are at this moment—the digital space. By following some of these principles in persuasion, you could be building new relationships and creating income funnels, simultaneously.
Email Marketing Campaigns Drive Today’s Business Cycles
With more money being spent on digital marketing, it’s also increasingly important that company decision makers are getting as much return on their investment as possible. Why should you be any different?
In the case of digital marketing, one of the easiest ways to make sales efforts more effective is to work on improving your email marketing.
The right email marketing campaign strategy can mean the difference between effective outreach and a project that stalls before it can get out of the gate. By making sure that email marketing campaigns are as personalized and customer targeted as possible, you can feel confident that your digital marketing investments are money well spent.
This post outlines everything that marketing leads, business decision makers, and sole proprietorships like you need to know about the beauty of personalized content and what it can do for email marketing strategy.
Making Things Personal: Why Personalized Email Content Works
Many of the benefits of email marketing are well-known and straightforward: communicating important information to clients or creating opportunities to contact them again are just a couple of email marketing tips.
If you haven’t done email marketing before, have confidence in knowing that you likely already have many of the business tools needed to make a go of it.
- You get emails
- You open emails
- You read emails
- You send emails
That new, secondary source of income is ripe with possibilities when you use the right email marketing strategies. Even if you currently don’t own a business, the very characteristics that corporations utilize to strengthen their digital content strategies live in the personal emails that you, as a consumer, receive and send.
Here’s why.
Master Unique Personal Content Strategy
Think about the last email you wrote and sent to someone you know: a friend, parent, coworker or sister. The content was about something or someone that held your interest and you thought it would do the same for the person you shared it with.
What about the last email you received and opened? Something in the subject line intrigued you enough to click and see the content inside.
These same simple ideologies apply to a business scope as well, but with some fine-tuning.
You might be wondering how one can take a personal email and convert it into a successful business email marketing strategy. Personalized email content based on truly knowing your customer base, their needs and wants, on subconscious and conscious levels, can offer so much more.
Tell them what they want and need. Then convince them of it by telling a story they can relate to. Then repeat.
Epic Fails Happen If You Forget to Follow Through
No matter how talented you may be in the art of persuasion, consumers rarely act on the first instance of exposure to a certain product, service, or event. Today, people are much more discriminating about the content they see and go to great lengths to search the competition, and verify the validity of any business.
Before the internet of things came to be, businesses relied solely on traditional means of marketing to get the word out about what they do, how they do it and the benefits to existing and potential customers. Back then, on average, 18 marketing impressions were needed for a consumer to act.
Today, there are more media channels to tout your marketing initiatives. But the same premise for content success holds true. Keep your messaging consistent and maintain your commitment to delivering a complete campaign.
Commitment and consistency are one of the 6 Principles of Influence founded by Dr. Robert Cialdini that support both marketing and sales in what it takes to get a consumer to say “Yes”. If you create content strategy that includes preset email drip campaigns sent to consumers on a regular basis, this is the follow through that keeps you and your business brand top-of-mind to the recipient. In addition, over time, the consumer will subconsciously expect to receive your messages in the email inbox.
Should your email happen to be delivered to them at the right time based on where they are emotionally, psychologically, and financially, the consistency you provided has already set their commitment in motion.
Target Multiple Customers
The right email content strategy allows you to efficiently generate content that appeals to clients of all ages, beliefs, and backgrounds. This allows your customers to feel like their needs are acknowledged without forcing companies to painstakingly create individually tailored marketing campaigns for each client.
Speak your customers’ language by matching their tone in speech and lifestyle. This can be done by the words you use and how you use them. Visual cues (images and colors) also help create the story you want them to absorb.
Why is this so important? A personalized email marketing strategy is highly focused on meeting clients where they live. When customers feel seen instead of sold to, they are far more willing to make a long-term connection with a brand, even if the company brand is you, the person.
Build Customer Relationships
Targeting customers based on their wants and interests isn’t just a matter of efficiency. It’s also the first step to building real relationships between you and your customers. People respond positively when they feel that their needs have been accounted for. The more personalization you incorporate into your email marketing strategy, the more likely your messaging will ring true with your customers at a deeper level.
Leverage Quality Content
You’ll need to spend time, energy, and resources developing relevant and interesting content. Whether it’s through a bunch of blog posts or a full playlist of videos to share, why not send users directly to the content most relevant to their needs? In your email marketing, include a link to your blog, or a screenshot of a video you’ve posted on your YouTube channel. They feel like you’ve done them a service, building trust, and you’ve driven engagement on your website. It’s hard not to see this as an absolute win.
Solidify Your Brand
By making your email marketing strategy more personal, you also create opportunities to demonstrate to your clients that communication and customer-first attitude are essential parts of your brand. In fact, it’s everything. Each interaction with potential customers builds an impression of your brand. A strategic email marketing plan can make sure those impressions are consistently positive.
Send a Message: What Personalized Email Content Looks Like
Don’t mistake emotional language with personalized content. Your goal is to build a connection with customers, yes, but there’s more to it than that. You are also tasked with making content as accessible and easy-to-consume as possible. The more you make life easier for your potential clients, the easier it is to communicate the features and benefits of your brand.
So what exactly should personalized email content look like? Much of the answer to this would depend on the preferences of your customers, but here are a few basic principles to follow when revising your approach:
- Be friendly, then get to the point – A relaxed greeting goes a long way. Try to avoid dry language and instead use the type of words you might in a casual conversation. Once you’ve said hello, start communicating the point of your message immediately. No one wants to read an email from a stranger for very long.
- Be casual, not over familiar – Be sure to keep it simple, approachable, not corporate, otherwise, that’s a quick way to lose a potential client’s interest. You also want to keep your sentences crisp and paragraphs short. It’s easy to scare off your intended audience with an overbearing wall of text.
- Be helpful, offer more value – Once you’ve introduced your brand and made a connection, you’ll want to seal the deal by directing them to continue reading your email, or visiting your website, or a social media channel. You can do this by including a link to your site or by directing visitors to other information assets, building even more added trust for customers.
What happens when email marketing gets too impersonal?
Remember that there’s always a fine line between making content more personal and getting unprofessional, risking a client relationship. This reminder goes double for industries that deal with sensitive topics, like funeral homes or addiction treatment centers. Getting too personal can turn ugly real fast. That’s why it’s best to avoid sensitive or emotionally charged topics when putting together your messaging for email marketing content.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
Another important component of designing effective email marketing strategies is to incorporate buyer personas into content development. Buyer personas, also known as “marketing personas,” are basically an archetype that represents one of your key customer groups.
When trying to establish who your buyer personas are, ask yourself “Who is my email audience?”
For a company that sells fitness accessories, for example, buyer personas could range from “Vanessa”, a college athlete looking to improve her performance, to “Cindy,” a stay-at-home mom trying to stay in shape.
In this scenario, a company would design content that appeals directly to “Vanessa” and then utilize that content anytime the brand engages with a college athlete. Likewise, stay-at-home moms would be personally targeted with content developed to appeal to “Cindy.” So what types of information should a company use to leverage into a personalized email marketing campaign?
Demographic Info
This type of information includes a potential customer’s age, location, status, gender, and employment. Marketers use this information to design advertising campaigns on a regular basis, and much of this information is available publicly through specialised online tools like Google Analytics. Not all customers that share demographics are identical; however, this is part of the puzzle.
Psychoanalytic Info
You’ll also want to get information about customers’ personal preferences, whether that be their ideology and values or simply their personal interests and hobbies. Collecting this type of information is a bit more difficult and it will likely fall upon you to track down customer data. Conducting surveys, via email, are a great way to build an understanding of who your clients are and what they like (or not).
Getting Started: Finding Support for Personalized Email Marketing
Collecting relevant demographic and personal data, organizing that information into segmented buyer personas, and presenting it all in an attractive way to your customers is a huge undertaking. That’s why it makes sense to learn as much about the process as possible and to develop a detailed, long-term digital marketing strategy. To this end, it might make sense to bring in some expert help, especially if you’re serious about building a successful passive income stream through an online business.
About the Author:
Jenny Stradling is the CEO and founder of Eminent SEO, an experienced, full-service digital marketing agency with a passion for making the Internet a better place. Jenny’s goal is to rid the digital landscape of poorly designed websites and unethical digital marketing practices. She works toward this goal personally, one client at a time. By leveraging decades of combined experience and a proven system for generating qualified leads, Eminent SEO ensures you’ll receive the best service possible.