Every effective email marketing strategy derives from and thrives on customer-data. This data provides the information that helps email marketers to drive sales and to know whether or not if they are selling the right products to the right audience. If you are in digital marketing, chances are, you are already sending emails to your customers with products you have on offer. If you have accurate customer data, you can make your emails more specific, targeted, and data-driven. Doing so helps to boost both traffic and sales for your business. Traditionally, marketing emails have always been an excellent medium to communicate with customers. By using customer data to learn more about your customers, you can provide them with the right email content and offers they like. That is one great way to keep them happy and loyal to your brand. One very good move for your marketing business no doubt.
Find below some recommended actions you can take to create an effective data-driven email marketing strategy for your business.
Consider Your Audience First
In digital marketing, the audience is key. It is just not enough to know what you are selling, but also who you are selling it to. That is your audience of customers and potential customers. If you have accurate audience demographics, it can make a huge difference as to how your product is received in the market, and how well it will sell. Marketers need customer data to help them figure out buyers’ demographics and who is buying what. Useful marketing demographics may include a person’s age, education, hobbies, tastes, job, gender, geographical location, language, culture, amongst others. If a marketer puts demographics into consideration, he/she can create more targeted emails for specific demographics. Such emails tend to get a much higher response rate, leads and sales.
Get the Timings Right
In digital marketing, it is not enough to market right, you must also endeavor to time your messages right for best results. Bad timing can kill the best of marketing initiatives and even ads. No matter how good your marketing emails are, once the timing is off, they’ll never get the best results. For this reason, when you are creating your email marketing strategy, you must get your timing right. Exactly at what time of the day do you need to get your emails out to be sure a good percentage of your recipients will open them, read them and possibly act on them? This is hugely important to the results you get.
Use Traditional Marketing Methods
The good part of traditional marketing methods is that they still get good results. They are very flexible and allow you to experiment to determine what works and what doesn’t. By using “traditional” methods of marketing particularly A/B testing, it is possible for a marketer to try one method and, if it doesn’t get the desired response, he/she can try another to determine which gets better results. That way, marketers can always try different methods to find out if a marketing idea is working. With Artificial Intelligence, AI now in use by marketers, if they have to experiment with several options, AI helps to make the process much faster and accurate.
Understand Your Audience
The best way to understand your audience is to, directly ask them their likes and dislikes. This you can do by sending out emails they can respond to. That gives them the chance to tell you what they like. If you understand your audience well enough, you can create effective emails to enable you market to them successfully. Even if a certain audience fits into same kind of demographics, it does not really mean they will all like the same things. Therefore, even within the same demographics, you can go a bit more personal to get a better and deeper understanding of the audience. Emails that appeal to this personal information are more likely to get better attention and more clicks.
Keep Your Customers Involved
Digital marketing is all about satisfying customers by meeting their needs. No marketer can guarantee that customers will love everything they offer all of the time. The reason is, there will always be those people who are more enthusiastic about your products than others are. Some will be more loyal to your business than others will. Successful marketing therefore will be to try to win back those customers who are less involved with your business. These are the type of customers you need to market to more by engaging them more. Marketers can now use AI to analyze customer data better and more accurately. The data helps them to keep an eye on dormant and lagging customers. You can get such customers to do better if you send them personalized emails regularly. Chances are, such emails will encourage them to shop more with you, and could prevent them from unsubscribing completely from your business.
Upsell at Every Opportunity
Smart marketers are very adept at upselling. Upselling is selling add-ons to customers to enhance their shopping experience. It is a way of selling items to customers they did not originally set out to buy. For instance, you can upsell seat covers and some other accessories to a customer who buys a car from you. In email marketing, customer data can provide the details needed to upsell products customers are very likely to buy. Marketers always take advantage of that to do some upselling.
Understand Predictive Analytics
Email marketing is mostly about prospecting online. It thrives on permutations and predictions hence the need for predictive analytics. Predictive analytics is all about looking at customer data and making predictions based on it. With it, marketers can successfully create targeted ads and emails by analyzing their buyers’ behavior and interests. These predictions come from analyzing browsing behavior or past purchases of customers, as well as their social media interactions and email engagements. For quicker customer data gathering and analysis, marketers now depend hugely on AI, machine learning, and algorithms that have a particular impact on predictive analysis. With them, marketers can also evaluate customer profiles and buying patterns better. That helps marketers to create more successful marketing strategies and campaigns.
Figure Out Customer Response Points
Just as all customers as individuals are separate from one another, so they all have separate individual points that they respond to. By using the right data, marketers can easily see the areas their customers are reacting to. That enables marketers to specially create and tailor emails depending on the customer preferences. Creating a marketing strategy that capitalizes on people’s preferences like this is one a great and very effective way to utilize both demographics and personal information to get good results.
Make Your Responses Personal to Customers
Yeah, most people like to feel and be treated very importantly. Customers are no exceptions to this human craving. Smart marketers make a point about this in responding to the customer’s behavior, with actions that tend to boost their ego and make them happy. By studying, analyzing and following personal customer data, you can respond better and more directly to these behaviors. That is one very effective way to reach out better to them with a view to getting better results out of their responses. For instance, by using AI, you can pinpoint the areas that customers keep looking at on your website. If such customers are yet to make a purchase from you, you can use this info to send emails to them with products relating to this topic and inviting them to buy. This is one great way of predicting your customer’s needs before they even know them. By doing this, you are also providing great customer service as well. This can go a long way to encourage your customers to keep coming back to do business with you.
