Introduction to Targeted Email Marketing
1. Defining the Data You Need
  1. Geo-targeting
  1. Demographics Segmentation
    1. Gender
    1. Age
    1. Income
  1. Psychographics Segmentation
    1. Interests
    1. Activities
The Benefits of Targeted Email Marketing
Conclusion: Getting Started

Targeted Email Marketing

One of the most basic concepts of marketing is knowing your target audience. As a marketer, knowing what to sell to your customers is a tedious task. However, it’s necessary to keep your brand relevant and in the loop. Otherwise, if the marketer or the brands doesn’t know what interests their audience – chances are, they are going to prefer a different brand or may simply lose interest in you. This concept may sound vague but it does apply to digital marketing and especially in email marketing.

Every customer has their own decision-making process when it comes to buying products online. As a matter of fact, people like to stay informed. And with today’s easy access on information, people research on products and they compare competitors. Some 87% of buying decisions begin with research conducted online, usually on Amazon or Google. Therefore, consumer segmentation and insights are crucial to better focus attention on details that appeal to your consumers and design an appropriate marketing campaign that will reflect their needs and interests.

One way to keep your audience’s attention is keeping them engaged in relevant information or offers from your email campaigns. In fact, 53% of users hit the unsubscribe button due to irrelevant email messages from brands. And, the surefire way to escape the un-subscriptions is by using a targeted strategy on your email campaigns.

As defined by Omnisend, targeted email marketing is sending specifically targeted and personalized email campaigns to subscribers based on their segmented characteristics, like profile data, behavior, location, etc. By segmenting your subscribers and sending targeted email campaigns, you can craft a more personalized message to go out to customers who fall into a certain segment. The more detailed your segments, the more personalized the message.

Again, with targeted email marketing, it comes with segmentation of your database or leads. According to Ascend2, segmentation is the third most effective strategy in email marketing after personalization and a meaningful call-to-action. In market segmentation, you can take different variables to determine how you want to group your audiences. It can be through their: demographics, psychographics, geo-location, engagement history, and so on. Once you have access to these data, segmentation will be easy for you.

Defining the Data You Need

The role of leads segmentation in email marketing is to send targeted email to interested subscribers rather than creating a one size fits all email marketing campaign.

Here are a few targeting tactics for building out an email with maximum relevance and resonance to your customers.

Geo-targeting: To filter your audience, the easiest way to do this is asking for a zip code during sign-up. You can use a geo-targeting method for campaigns or promotions that are limited to certain locations. For example, you are releasing a Buy 1 Take 1 promotion in your store in a certain area. Surely, you just want to offer this promo to the people in your database that belong to that area.

Demographics Segmentation: This is the process of dividing your market into segments based on age, gender, income, religion, education. Segmenting your audience based on their demographics can improve your sales drastically. Here’s a sample targeted campaign analysis, a student is more likely to look for sample sales and clearance than a working professional in their 40s who can afford that full-priced handbag. Or if you are pushing for a sale on men’s active wear, ideally you just want to send your email marketing promotion to the male segment in your database.

Let’s look deeper at the different types of demographics segmentation that you can collect and prioritize.

Gender: Women and men shop differently. Relevance goes a long toward building trust. But don’t get us wrong, when doing gender segmentation, you don’t have to exclude a gender. The best results are achieved when you know which genders prefer specific products. For example, if you’re a skincare product it’s up to you if you want to focus on one gender over the other. Some beauty products want to focus on females, such as Sephora.

Age: Age is also another common factor used to segment customers. It’s often paired with gender segmentation to create a more streamlined profile. For example, you are a shaving cream brand. You can target the male segment between the ages of 25-44.

There are commonly accepted age groups for marketing and advertising purposes:

12-17
- 18-24
- 25-34
- 35-44
- 45-54
- 55-64
- 65+

Income: Use income segmentation when you have either have expensive or inexpensive products. When you segment the groups that can afford the products away from the ones that can’t, you get a more desired response from your audience. Segmenting your audience through income mostly helps brands that have a niche market. Sample brands who uses this are luxury car brands, designer bags, and etc.

To summarize, demographic segmentation is an important starting point to communicate to the right market and address their needs. Attaining the right demographic information, you can create tests and refine your messaging. While over time, you will also understand whether what age, gender or income does your product or brand serve.

Psychographics Segmentation: It is defined when you break your customer groups to their interests, lifestyle, social status, opinions, and activities.

When you’ve done psychographic segmentation properly, you’re able to:

Understand how your customers perceive your company and products
Understand how your products fit into their life
Reveal what they actually (not what you think) want to achieve
Identify pain points related to your products
Address objections people will have

Psychographic segmentation is necessary to position the same product differently for people of different interests. Segmenting according to their affinity or psychographics, will help your brand to attract a diverse group of customers without making material changes to your product.

Now, let’s look deeper at the different types of psychographics segmentation.

Interests: Interest is the degree of engagement people have with something. How interested or disinterested is someone with a certain thing? For example, you may find out that a segment of your customers like sports, or they prefer tea over coffee. These may look like simple data, but depending on your brand – you would know who to talk to.
Activities: This one is straightforward. What does someone’s day to day look like? Closely related to interests, tracking down the activities may look like tracing their spending habits or digital habits as well. This segmentation will let you group your audience by the following:
- How often do they engage in the activity?
- Is the activity required (for work, school, memberships, etc.)
- Do they spend money on the activity?

Each of the psychographics elements of lifestyle builds upon one other. What likely happens is a person has already formed an opinion about something before your business every came into their life. Therefore, you adjust your email communication to fit into their lifestyle and eventually, your brand.

The Benefits of Targeted Email Marketing

“When you send the right email to the right person at the right time, it doesn’t feel like marketing. A targeted, deliberate email feels like it’s coming from a friend.” – Campaign Monitor

According to Pure 360, targeted email marketing differs to its bulk counterpart by sending customized emails to certain demographics, based on their needs. For example, if your brand formulated a product or service aimed at 18-24 year olds, ideally you’d want to target this core audience above any other.

It’s as simple as this – why would you target your email at the 65+ age group, when it was designed for a teenager audience?

Driving Them Down the Sales Funnel

Apart from the demographics and psychographics targeting, one of its key benefits is your ability to target those at different stages of the buying cycle with the content that is most relevant to them. There are three main stages of sales funnel – awareness or interest, consideration or research and finally, purchase or conversion. Communicating to your audience by following which in the sales funnel they are currently in can be a gentle approach that improves your chance of getting them to conversion stage. Once they reach this stage, you can begin to offer customized quotes or targeted plans within your marketing emails.

Engagement and Reach

When a targeted email marketing is extremely successful, it can start start to build strong relationship between your brand and your audience. With all the relevant and insightful information you send out to your market, your brand becomes a go-to and eventually, an immediate option. Nurturing your leads through targeted information can help position your brand as an expert in the field. Thus, increasing more engagement and reach.

ROI Achieved

Any marketing campaign has all these goals in line and you can definitely set these as objectives in your next email marketing campaign too. These are all lovely benefits, but they all ultimately contribute to one thing – maximized ROI. Using a targeted approach makes your email marketing work harder for you, allowing you to reap as much value as possible from your investment. Your return could be higher than your outlay – isn’t that at the heart of every worthwhile investment?

Conclusion: Getting Started

You probably have that big list from a leads generation campaign. And if it’s not obvious enough, the first step to start a targeted email campaign is to segment your audience from your database. You can start by segmenting them based on their demographics, if you don’t have their psychographic information yet. Psychographic data of a consumer are often taken from surveys. So if you’re considering to segment them based on their interests or habits, you might as well start a survey within your audience.

Apart from segmentation, you might also need to do a clean-up in your database. Figure out who are not opening your emails. At the end of the day, you just want to talk to the right audience. Plus, high open rates will help ensure inbox placement, while unsubscribes and spam complaints will drive down deliverability.

The most important takeaway here is that you want to reach the right audience with email content that are relevant to them and that adds value. When you succeed, everybody wins.