With our inboxes filled to the brim, targeted email marketing allows companies to cut through the clutter by creating tailored, personalized messages that are more interesting than your one-size-fits all email blast.
Learn the who-what-why behind targeted email marketing and how you can use segmentation and personalization to create emails that engage your audience.
Targeted email marketing is the practice of segmenting your email contacts by demographics, interests, or behavior to create personalized communications. This personalization leads to higher engagement with your emails compared to a generic email blast.
For example, imagine you open your inbox and you click on an email from an outdoor brand. You’re an avid mountain biker and have purchased a variety of gear from this brand, and yet, when you open the email the items featured are wet suits, bathing suits, and surf boards.
Disappointed, you unsubscribe from the email chain.
That is an example of an untargeted email that was sent to a wide group of individuals without considering their interests or background.
Instead, let’s imagine a targeted email marketing scenario where you receive an email with mountain biking gear that offers a 20% discount. You’ve had your eye on this gear and the discount is just the thing you need to persuade you to make the purchase. Instead of unsubscribing, the targeted email leads you to conversion.
Targeted email marketing enables companies to send the right message at the right time to the right audience, creating a happier, more engaged customer base, and more revenue for the business. It’s a win-win.
Before you can set up targeted email marketing campaigns, you need to gather data about your subscribers. This could be through signup forms, website interactions, purchase history, or surveys. Consider asking your subscribers for demographic information, such as age, location, or industry as well as product preferences. You can also track the user’s behavior through website visits or purchase history to help you better understand their interest in your brand.
Based on the data you collected, divide your email marketing list into segments with shared characteristics. For example, you could group your segments by customer engagement levels, such as first-time buyers, loyal customers, and inactive subscribers. For companies that have a global presence with customers across many time zones, segmenting by location can be beneficial to reaching contacts at the right time.
Once your segments are defined, create targeted email campaigns with personalized content and offers relevant to each group. For example, if you have a number of subscribers who have recently signed up but have not purchased from your business yet, you could offer a one-time, 20% discount for first-time customers.
With your email marketing targeted and personalized toward specific segments, you’re well on your way to increasing engagement and enhancing your customers’ experience.
The average person now receives 121 emails per day, which makes targeted email marketing no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have for brands to get the attention of their consumers.
Personalizing and segmenting emails does require some legwork to set up, but trust us. The work is worth the reward.
Targeted email marketing provides:
Increased open rates and click-through rates: According to Hubspot, segmented emails drive 30% more opens and 50% more clicks-throughs than unsegmented ones.
Improved customer experience and loyalty: If a customer is receiving content that is personalized to their experience with your brand, they’re more likely to engage with your content and stay in touch with your brand. About 55% of consumers said they had a more enjoyable email experience with retailers that sent targeted promotions and discounts.
Higher conversion rates and sales: Ultimately, personalized content leads to greater ROI. According to Litmus, brands that include dynamic content (personalized content that changes depending on their interests) report a 22% increase in ROI compared to those who never or rarely use dynamic content.
Using the targeted list for email marketing, you can create campaigns for a variety of demographics, product interests, and behaviors. To help you see what targeted campaigns look like, here are a few everyday examples separated by engagement, behavior, and demographics.
Engagement or activity level is a great way to segment your contacts. Segmenting by engagement level allows you to create a different email nurture for those who are very active, inactive and need to be reengaged, and those who are new to your contact list.
Welcome emails for new subscribers
Welcome emails help introduce your brand to new subscribers, confirm their subscription, and offer immediate opportunities for engagement. A common practice for retail businesses, as shown in the example with Vessi below, is to offer a 10-20% discount or free gift for new subscribers, speeding up the transition from new subscriber to paying customer.
If a subscriber hasn’t opened your brand’s emails in a while, it’s time to send a re-engagement campaign. Re-engagement campaigns ensure that you’re sending to contacts who truly want your emails. Send an email to this segment asking whether they’d like to stay subscribed to your targeted email marketing list. This prevents your emails from ending up to spam and leading to problemsome deliverability issues down the road.
Sending emails that are triggered by certain user behaviors can help remind users of products they’re interested in and gently push them toward conversion.
Product recommendation emails
By tracking shopping history and website engagement, businesses can serve emails with dynamic content that features the products the users explored. Another advantage of dynamic content is its ability to update in real-time. For example, if your business sold out of an item, with dynamic content the item would be automatically removed from the email. In its place, the user would see another item that they clicked on.
While a consumer may intend to purchase something, it’s possible they got distracted along the way and unintentionally abandoned their cart. Abandoned cart emails are targeted reminders for consumers to pick up where they left off and complete the checkout process. The emails don’t need to be overly complex and should focus on reminding customers of their potential purchase, like the email example below.
Depending on your business’ industry, location, age, industry, career, can all be valuable information to help create targeted email communications.
Birthday or anniversary promotions
Birthday promotions can be a fun way of engaging your subscribers and keeping them interested in your brand. Collect your contacts’ birthday when they sign up for emails to send this targeted promotion. Birthday promotions make customers feel special (who doesn’t want a free coffee on their birthday?!) and offer a simple way of strengthening customer loyalty.
Geo-targeting for local promotions
With geo-targeting, all you need is your contact’s zip code. Using their zip code, you can provide the physical store that’s closest to the contact, adjust the send time, and offer local promotions. For example, using your location and your music preferences, Spotify sends personalized concert recommendations of artists that will be in your area.
Targeted email marketing is your ticket to upleveling your email program. It helps companies stand out in a crowded inbox, improves customer trust and loyalty, and, ultimately, leads to higher conversion rates and greater ROI.
If you haven’t already, it’s time to ditch the generic email blasts and embrace the power of targeted email marketing.
For a scalable email marketing platform that allows you to segment your subscribers and create campaigns with ease, explore Twilio SendGrid’s Email Marketing solution.
