When it comes to marketing, the old saying ‘target the audience, not the audience’ is a common one. However, trying to guess who your target audience is, particularly in regard to a niche product or service, can be difficult. It’s also not practical – sending emails to everyone won’t get you very far. So, you need to figure out a way to target your leads effectively. This article will discuss one approach that you might consider using – sending an email to people with a shared interest in your product or service.
The Benefits Of Email Marketing
To begin with, let’s consider the benefits of email marketing.
- Marketing through email lets you reach the right audience,
- With the right content, you can engage your leads,
- And establish customer trust,
- All at the expense of minimal effort,
- So, it’s an ideal strategy for B2C (Business to Consumer)
- Marketing.
In addition to these benefits, email marketing allows you to test the efficacy of your marketing campaigns quickly and easily. You can gauge the response to a particular email, marketing message, or offer, based on the action you’ll see on the other side. The key to a successful email marketing strategy is to make sure that you follow up the initial email with additional communication, either through email or social media, to maintain the connection and, hopefully, convert those leads into paying customers.
How To Reach The Right People With Email Marketing
Now, let’s consider how to reach the right people with email marketing. In order to do this, you need to consider a variety of factors, including:
- The value of the product/service you’re promoting,
- The type of content you’ll use to engage your audience,
- How long you’ll spend on each stage of the buying process,
- The number of emails you’ll need to send,
- The language you’ll use,
- Whether you’ll employ a fun, engaging tone, or a more traditional approach,
- And, finally, your budget.
With these considerations in mind, you can develop a plan to reach the right audience with the email you’ll send. Below, we’ll discuss some of the tactics you might use.
1. Develop An Inbox Blanket Policy
One of the most effective ways to reach the right people with email is to establish a blanket policy regarding your inbox. Simply put, this is where you will store all of the emails you receive, regardless of the source. Inbox blanket policies save you from having to sort through your email, looking for relevant information and action items. So, rather than having one massive inbox, which can become cumbersome to manage, your email marketing strategy will rely on a clean slate policy of sorts – one that weeds out all of the unimportant, redundant, or potentially harmful content, while allowing you to easily find the relevant information, at hand, when you need it.
Email marketing is an incredibly fast, easy, and cost-effective way to reach customers – as long as you’ve got an inbox of some sort. Even better, if you’ve got a personal email account, you can rest assured that you’ll never truly be out of touch – no matter where you are, or what you’re doing. This level of convenience makes email marketing an ideal approach for brands that want to stay connected, and provide useful information, to their customers regardless of whether they’re in town, or across the sea – or even the other side of the planet!
2. Use Automation To Grow Your List
An important consideration when it comes to email marketing, and the right people with email, is automation. Simply put, if you’ve got a manageable list of leads, you can train your staff, and even your family and friends, to engage with your audience on your behalf. With the help of tools like MailChimp, Marketo, and HubSpot, among others, you can build automated email campaigns that will, in theory, have a high conversion rate.
These tools make it easy to draft automated emails – the perfect thing for busy marketers who want to cut loose, and still have an effective marketing campaign up and running. As an example, MailChimp offers a sophisticated interface that allows you to craft automated email campaigns that will have a high delivery rate. This is precisely what makes MailChimp so popular among marketers and spammers alike. Additionally, they offer a self-serve platform, so you can easily create and send out mass emails, as and when you want. This makes them a useful tool for marketers who want to stay in touch with their audience – a group that constitutes the ideal right people with email. As we’ve established, reaching the right people with email is all about establishing a connection with your audience through relevant content – something that can be maintained through effective automation tools.
3. Build An Email List With Care
As we’ve established, using automation to grow your list is essential – and it’s a critical step towards effective email marketing. However, even then, you’ll occasionally need to engage with your leads, and the best way to do this, is through regular email marketing, which can be easily measured through a tool like HubSpot. Simply put, HubSpot helps you track the performance of every aspect of your email marketing campaign – from the number of people opening your emails, to whether or not they clicked on the links, to whether or not they purchased a product after being emailed about it. These sorts of tools allow you to have an entirely data-driven approach to your email marketing – something that should be considered an essential component of any successful email marketing strategy.
With a list of the right people with email in hand, you can branch out, and begin to consider various marketing tactics, the perfect example of which is:
- Engagement:
- Re-engagement:
- Up-selling:
- Cross-selling:
- Lifetime value, and so on.
4. Measure The Results Of Your Efforts
The final step in the successful email marketing process is measuring the results of your efforts. This is a critical step, as you’ll need to determine whether or not your email marketing campaign was effective – and if it was, you can develop a new one, or modify the old one, to meet the needs of your audience, and continue to grow your business.
The measure of success for your email marketing campaign is, generally, sales, either through online shopping, or in-person buying, but it can also be gauged, in part, through various metrics, like the number of times someone clicked on a link, or the number of people who opened an email, for example.
As we’ve established, reaching the right people with email doesn’t happen automatically – you have to do your research, and put in the effort to establish a connection, through relevant content, with the individuals on your list. Once you’ve done this, you can rest assured that you’ve created a platform for effective communication, which will continue to grow, as long as you maintain its connection to the right people.