Simple Revenue Increase
Your company has gotten serious about digital marketing. Good! You’ve started strong with a presence on social media, you’ve gathered data about your customers, and you’ve started an email marketing campaign. Excellent! At Hughes Media, we consider email marketing a strong foundation for any digital marketing effort. Now, how do you take that to the next level?
A study conducted by Experian Marketing Services found that personalized promotional emails increased transaction rates and revenue per email six times greater than emails with no personalization. That’s a significant finding. The study also uncovered that 70 percent of brands inexplicably failed to exploit the benefits of email personalization.
HOW Do You Personalize?
While it can take several forms, email personalization is simply showing your customers that you’re paying attention to them and their interests. It can start as basic as a personalized greeting – “Dear Susan,” followed by the remainder of your message. That small step goes a long way to building rapport with your customer. More advanced personalization features include:
- Personalized email subject lines – Using the customers’ names or information specific to them will garner more attention. For example, a customer visits a shopping site and places an item in her shopping cart. She leaves the site without checking out. The marketing campaign generates an email with a subject line that may read, “Jennifer, did you forget something?” or “Jennifer, did you have a question about this item?”
- Personalized offers – Generate offers based on browsing history as a hook to capture a sale. For example, a customer visits the lipstick page of your website. Your marketing system generates an email with a 10% off coupon for lipstick.
Using techniques such as these can help increase unique open rates as well as unique click rates. Experian claimed that personalized emails resulted in 29 percent higher unique open rates and 41 percent unique click rates in their study. To secure these benefits for your business, contact us at Hughes Media to help you build stronger connections with customers and increase revenues.
Go Even Deeper with Segmentation
In addition to personalization efforts, advanced marketers capitalize on another means of connecting deeply with customers – segmentation. This focused process divides your customer list into different segments, each with a common identifier. In this way, you can target specific groups of people with distinct messages to push them forward through your sales funnel.
You can segment according to whatever makes the most sense for your marketing plan, such as purchase history, geographic locations, birthdays, conferences/events attended, webinars, etc. After creating these different segments, you can then send emails to each group with messages specifically tailored for each group. Some examples include:
- Segment by conference attendees. You may then send a new message to this group about another upcoming conference, a survey seeking feedback, etc.
- Segment by people with little activity on your website. Messages may be sent to this list of customers to generate increased engagement – opinion-seeking surveys, requests for product reviews, etc.
- Segment by geography. Notify these groups of opportunities to attend nearby trade shows, book signings, meet-the-staff events, etc.
- Segment by birthday. Send a 10 percent off coupon to everyone with birthdays in the upcoming month.
When using an email platform or CRM integrated with your website, you can get as granular as you desire for even more effective connections with your customers. If you do not have the hookups, talk to one of our specialists about how this can be done. Usually, this involves setting up an API that will allow your website and email platform to sync information with one another.
Seek Expertise for Results
There are countless ways to use these personalization and segmentation strategies to reach and build a stronger relationship with your audience. Hughes Media specialists can help you take advantage of these steps now to beat the competition for your potential customers. Contact us today to design and implement custom strategies to take your marketing to a new level of success.
About the Author:
Deedra Hughes
Experienced President with a demonstrated history of working in the marketing and advertising industry. Skilled in Digital Strategy, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Integrated Marketing, Advertising, and Pay Per Click (PPC). Strong business development professional with a Bachelor’s Degree focused in Communications from Ohio University.