Know Your Audience: The Key To Quality Email
A great marketing email is straightforward, concise, and asks its reader to do one simple thing: click on a single call to action (CTA). A good CTA, for example, may take them to a sales landing page, a blog article, or a calendar to schedule a call. No matter what, it should move your email recipient into some kind of funnel that encourages them to stay engaged with your company and continue their business with you.
Enticing your audience to click on your CTA is an uphill battle. Consider that even in the most successful email campaigns, the average click-through rate (CTR) is only around 3%. That means that for every 100 people who get your email, only three of them are clicking into your funnel.
The challenge is: how do you optimize your CTR to get more of your audience to engage with your brand?
The answer may sound obvious, but it’s crucial to creating a successful email campaign: know your audience.
In this article, the fifth in a six-part series that explores the ways marketing email content encourages recipients to engage with your company, we’ll delve into some techniques to use when defining your target audience. We’ll also look at the tools Admail offers to help you create great audience-focused content and get it in front of the recipients who are most likely to respond to your email campaigns.
How to Define Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience goes beyond generalized demographic data. Instead, we want you to get specific and come up with a customer profile — called a buyer persona — a comprehensive description of the person who is most likely to engage with your brand and become a paying customer.
Many large companies spend thousands with marketing firms to create in-depth, data-driven buyer personas. If you’re a small business, however, and you’re not ready to invest that much, you can still create very effective target customer profiles on your own.
As a starting place, it’s helpful to look at your current customer base and try to identify the people who are most likely to make a purchase with you. You may start to see that those people have a lot in common. From there, you can start asking some questions about them to begin assembling a fleshed-out target customer profile.
Even if you have to take some imaginative leaps, try to get as specific as possible when answering the following:
- What are their backgrounds and vital stats? This is basic information about them, including their gender, marital and family status, geographic location, level of education, etc.
- What do they do? Define what they do for work, their income range, and how they feel about their job.
- How do they interact with your brand? Identify the ways they might shop for your products. Are they coming to your retail store or shopping online? What time of day are they interacting with you? What devices do they use to view your products?
- What problems does your product solve for them? In other words, what desire or need does your product satisfy for them? What challenges, fears, or frustrations do you relieve?
- What might keep them from making a purchase with you? Try to pinpoint the objections they might come up with that would dissuade them from clicking through. For instance, “This product is too expensive,” or “This doesn’t solve my immediate problem.”
Tips to Create Effective Content for Your Target Audience
Often, a brand will make the mistake of trying to address the widest audience possible in their messaging. This has the effect of diluting your message and reducing overall engagement.
Instead of trying to win over the 97% of recipients who won’t click through, have a great conversation with the 3% who will. When you know whom your emails are addressing, you can tailor the content to them, making them feel like your brand is talking to their specific needs.
A great rule of thumb: just like in a real-world conversation, it’s kind of obnoxious if all you do is talk about yourself and how great your products are. Instead, focus your content on your target customer. Address their hopes, concerns, and objections, so they feel seen and heard.
A quick way to accomplish this is to go through your email and rewrite any sentences that start with the word “we.” The goal is to shift the focus of the sentences onto the reader. For example, you could change “We make the world’s best ice cream” to “Satisfy your sweet tooth on a hot day with our delicious ice cream!”
Use Admail to Speak Directly to Your Target Audience
Because you have such a clear picture of whom you're trying to speak with, you can leverage Admail's suite of features to give you an even greater advantage when trying to get in front of your specific audience. Admail offers our users a fantastic tool called List Builder to help you to collect and leverage your valuable buyer persona data. You can use the List Builder, Smartgroups to filter your email list based on the custom rules you put in place.
For instance, if you’ve identified your target customer as a woman in her 30s who lives in the tri-state area, you can set rules within Admail’s Smartgroups tools to filter your email list to only send your campaign to people who fit that description.
Smartgroups gives you the ability to increase your odds of getting your targeted message in front of the customers who are most likely to click through into your funnel. This can result in a much higher CTR, which can lead to more solid leads and higher conversion rates from your marketing efforts.
Understand Your Target Audience With Admail
The job of gaining a deeper understanding of your target audience is never over. Admail gives its users the tools they need to refine their buyer personas based on the ways recipients interact with your email campaigns.
AccuTrak is our powerful statistics reporting tool that will help you learn more about your target customer and determine if your messaging strategies are working the way you need them to. With AccuTrak, you can track important metrics like CTRs, unsubscribe requests, non-deliverables, and more. See up-to-the-minute data for individual campaigns, and compare it to historical data to help you follow your progress over time. AccuTrak also works to keep your audience up-to-date by automatically removing dead and unsubscribed emails.
By tracking your important audience data, you can continue to add detail to your buyer persona profiles, revealing new and actionable elements of customer behavior and helping you to focus your messaging more accurately with every new campaign.
Contact Admail for a free 30-day trial of our services, and let us work with you to create your most effective email campaigns to drive your business forward. Check back soon for the final article in this series, where we’ll go through the vital links between email marketing and SMS opt-in messaging features.