Written by Hannah Smith – Marketing Student at Oregon State University
Emails can easily become lost within consumers’ inboxes. How will you make your emails stand out to your consumer? A good email marketing strategy involves targeting a specific target market in order to catch their attention within their email inbox. The best way to do this is to create a persona for your brand! In this blog, we will show you how you can incorporate a persona into your email marketing strategy to ensure that your emails never get lost!
Creating Your Brand’s Persona
The first step would be to create your brand’s persona. In marketing, A persona is a made up person who represents your brand’s ideal consumer. When you think of your target market, this person represents the entire group. So, the first thing you’ll want to determine is the demographics of your persona. Is your ideal customer male or female? How old are they? How much of an education do they have, and what is their ideal income? These are the most important demographic factors when determining your persona, because gender, age, education and income really determine what type of things the target marketing is interested in generally, helping you pinpoint exactly what they want and need. Another question to ask yourself include location of the customer, whether it be a specific location, or type of area such as urban, suburban or rural.
Now that you know the demographics of your ideal customer, you need to figure out what that person is like. You’ll want to determine things such as their personality, values, needs and wants, likes and dislikes, hobbies and who their influence might be. These traits will help you determine what your brand’s persona values in their daily life. Determining these traits will allow you to understand the customer on a personal level and target your messages toward someone who is receptive to the same values and traits. You’ll also want to know what types of things concern or worry your ideal consumer. Knowing this will allow your brand to reassure your consumers and know how to resolve their problems and concerns with your products or services.
Creating your persona will take a lot of time and research to create an effective persona that can be utilized to grow your brand. With a quick google search, there are many great templates available to create a document with a blueprint of your brand’s persona. To get started, I highly recommend you use an online persona template!
Using Your Brand’s Persona
Now that you have defined your persona, it’s time to apply it to your marketing strategy. There are many ways that you can incorporate your brand’s persona into email marketing. How will you utilize your brand’s persona to create an email campaign? How will you incorporate your ideal consumer’s personality and values into an email campaign?
The first thing to notice is your email list. Do the consumers in your email list align with the brand persona that you have developed? Your email won’t gain any attention if you don’t send the email to the right crowd. You may even want to try segmentation. This is when you send your email to a select group of people within your email list. For example, you may have primary and secondary target markets, but you could segment your email list and only send your email campaign to one of the groups if it better fits their lifestyle. This can help you target certain groups of customers, especially if their better fit your new persona.
The next thing you want to consider is the subject line of the email. The subject line is the first thing the consumer sees when looking through their email. The subject line is also the first thing that encourages them to open and read the email. It’s important to come up with a short phrase that catches the eye of your ideal consumer and encourages them to keep reading and continue to your website.
Finally, to complete an effective email campaign, you’ll need to finalize your email content to correlate with the message you are trying to send to your target market. Here, you can utilize your brand’s persona to draw your consumer’s personality and interests into the content of the email. You want your email content to feel personalized to your target market, based on the persona you developed to represent that group of consumers.
Using these steps to create a persona for your brand and marketing campaigns will help you create an effective email campaign and make sure that your emails helping you grow your business and create more conversions. Getting more conversions is always the goal! You just need to develop the right tools to help you get there.
Citations
Digital Marketing Essentials, Larson and Draper, Chapter 8: Email Marketing
What are marketing personas and how will they help you?https://www.simplifie.com/marketing-blog/what-are-marketing-personas-and-how-will-they-help-you
5 Ways to Create Super-Effective Emails with Buyer Personas https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/01/31/email-marketing-with-buyer-personas
