When people usually think of “Email Marketing” their first instinct is that it is a type of spam or shady email from companies. Additionally, customers also assume that we receive their emails from unsolicited methods unethically. Email messages are the preferred method of communication with companies by customers. (Larson and Draper, 2021) About 70% of the customers in a survey responded that emails are the preferred method of companies to communicate with them. (Burstein, 2015)
What is Email Marketing & Why is it so important?
Email marketing is a method of informing clients on your email list about new products, promotions, and other services. It can also be a softer way to educate your audience about your brand’s worth or keep them engaged in between transactions. It could also be anything in between. Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective tools as well that is available for marketers. However, one thing to point out here is that the company must capture an Email List through ethical means only so that the emails do not go in to spam folders or blocked. In a 2015 study done in the UK, the Direct Marketing Association found that for every dollar a company invests in their email marketing content and an email sent, there is an average Return on Investment (ROI) of about $38. Email marketing is important for the following reasons:
Building Customer Loyalty
Improving customer loyalty and retention is a major goal for all marketers, and email marketing is a major way to do that. Brands can use email marketing to reach out to the consumers and remind them about exclusive offers for the customers. Emails can also be used to tailor specific campaigns to consumer groups. Additionally, inviting and enrolling in a VIP program can make the consumer realize that they are valuable to the company, and can encourage them to engage with the company. Email marketing can also be used to convert inactive users/customers into loyal customers by targetting exclusive offers to this group and sending them incentives to re-engage with the company. (Mughees, 2021)
Brand Outreach and Recognition
According to survey research conducted by Litmus, an approximate 82% of the consumers open and interact with the emails that they recieve from companies. (2020) Because it gives you a direct line to your customers’ or potential customers’ email inboxes, email marketing is a terrific approach to build your brand identification. You’ll have a leg up on your competitors if you start providing quality material for them. This shows that customers do see and interact with the emails that we are sending to them. This is especially beneficial as a small business when you are trying to spread awareness of your product and service, email marketing can be a major tool in spreading awareness.
Generating Traffic, Increasing Sales
Email marketing can help in boost businsess sales by a lot. As mentioned before, for every dollar that businesses spend on email marketing, they can make up to $30-50 on their investment. (2020) conversion rates. Additionally, 66% of the customer make atleast one purchase being influenced by their emails. (Campaign Monitor) Companiess should do the following to drive up sales through their Email Marketing Campaigns:
- Use catchy statements, and show how the company can bring value. (see image)
- Write concise, and to-the-point messages
- Have a strong CTA for each email.
- Include high quality visuals on your emails.
- Create targetted email campaigns using personas.
What are Personas and Why are they important for Email Marketing?
Personas are essentially a generalized, fictional representation of the ideal customer that you want. (Hubstpot, 2021) Personas help in understanding who buys from your company, what are their buying patterns and why they buy. On the other hand, a Negative Personas are a semi-fictional representation of you less than idea customers. Buyer personas can help in creating personalized email campaigns that can be used to convert subscribers in to customers. Here are a few tips that can help you imporve email marketing with personas:
- Create a Email Marketing Strategy
Your personas can be very helpful in creating a strategy. You can do this by understanding and uncovering useful information about the customers purchase journey through personas. Their motivations to buy, and what brings them value. Every email campaign should be focused on a goal that the company wants to achieve. This could be various goals such as increasing conversions, spread brand = awareness or get referrals. Once the goal is decided, you can think about the content that you want to include in the email such as promotions, sale events, information about products, news letters etc.
- Ad-Copy Improvements
When creating an email marketing and ad copy campaign, it is important to utilize personas to find and target the customer. Improvements should be made after understand how and what each segment effectively responds to. Companies would benefit from making headlines stand out, adding attractive imagines and colorful vidyals and make sure that they are focusing on the value brough by the product. Optimizing based on the CTR, and responsiveness is essential to improve the quality of email marketing.
- Segmented Emails
Emails that are targetted to specific audience have a higher chance of being opened. Click through rates (CTR) are 100.95% higher in segmented email campaigns rather than non-segmented campaigns. (Intuit) Personas help in analyzing the different content that would work with different audience and be more personal with the message. The company can segment the customers through different ways such as Demographic-specific (Age, Income, Gender), Content-based (Personal interests), and Behavior-specifics (Past purchases, Amount spent, Position in Sales-Funnel and Website Behaviors). (Patel) The further you can segment your your emails, the more detailed and relevant you can be in your emails, giving you the attention and engagement you deserve in the inbox.
- Call to Actions and Offers.
Buyer personas help brands identify the individual needs of the customers. For example, if you are targetting an email for a middle-aged person, you want to make sure that it is relatively free of clutter, as compared to a teenager where in you would want the email to be exciting and colorfull. Similarly call-to-actions should also be customized based on the demoographic that they are targetting. For example, a simple button such as “Shop” may work for some customers, and some would need more convincing — such as an infographic. Buyer personas can help brand in making sure that they are using teh right strategy for the right customer.
We hope that this blog helps you in creating more effective Email Marketing Campaigns using personas.
