Persona-Based Email Marketing
Did you know that around 87% of all business owners use email marketing to reach potential customers? This places email marketing in second place among the most popular marketing techniques, right behind social media marketing.
Even if you’re already using this strategy to extend your exposure across the internet, simply sending emails are not enough. Today’s customers look for a higher level of personalization and relevance. For instance, around 56% of people unsubscribe from emails that aren’t resourceful or relevant to them.
It’s time to do more than simply mentioning the first names of your customers in the subject line and calling your emails personalized. Keep reading to see what persona-based marketing is and how to integrate it into your marketing strategy.
How To Create Buyer Personas for Email Marketing Campaigns
While personalization in email marketing campaigns is highly effective, many statistics show that the technique can quickly become monotonous and predictable. In other words, customers already know you can place their first names on the subject line.
That’s why your marketing strategy should be based on thorough research and information if you want your customers to read your emails.
We know what you’re thinking—gathering and organizing customer data isn’t easy, but it is the only way to create good buyer personas for your email campaigns. Apart from collecting intelligent insights, you should take many other steps to develop beneficial buyer personas for your organization.
Know Your Customers and Your Market
To create effective personas, you should clearly understand how your market works and who buys your products. Make sure to take your customers’ basic demographics such as age, location, economic conditions, and purchase preferences into account.
Then, you should specify which is the ideal buying persona you want to target. You can easily acquire this information by using Google Analytics or your website’s customer service. Additionally, you can conduct an online search or ask visitors to fill out surveys about their experience.
Segment Your Potential Customers
After you have all the information about the type of people who purchase your products, it is time to segment them into individual buyer personas.
When segmenting potential customers, you have to think like your customers to determine what each persona wants from your brand. These personas become fictional representations of your customers facing problems and challenges like real people, each with their roles and objectives.
Once you use your data metrics to segment your customers into different personas, you can develop personalized emails for each group.
Some aspects you should consider while segmenting your customers include:
- Determining whether they are leads, customers, prospects, or former customers
- Understanding where did they subscribed to your email campaign
- Analyzing what they downloaded, bought, or read on your website
Once you group your customers into different personas, you can cater to each person according to their needs.
Streamline Your Approach
When developing a persona for a marketing strategy, it is essential to streamline your approach. Anything more than ten personas, and you will most likely exhaust yourself while creating tailor-made content for each one.
That’s why limit yourself to the personas that prove most beneficial for your business. For example, if you’re operating a skincare blog, your primary personas could be men, women, teenagers, and people looking for aging solutions or having problematic skin types.
This way, you wouldn’t be sharing irrelevant content such as daily skincare routines for teenagers to people from other age groups.
Besides that, you can sub-categorize each persona as well. For example, men can be divided between homemakers and working men, while skin problems can be divided into dry, combination, or acne-prone skin.
How To Use Buyer Personas
If you have already created buyer personas for your email marketing campaign but aren’t achieving the results you’d like, you’re probably using them in the wrong way. Here’s how to use buyer personas once created to reap their optimal benefits:
Customize Your Emails
The right way to use buyer personas is to deliver carefully curated, relevant content to each segment. Then, based on what you know about each group, you will need to modify your emails accordingly.
The varying aspects of each email should be the subject line, content alerts, delivery times, and call to action. Let’s take the example of the skincare blog again.
If you’re targeting the persona of a middle-aged working man, you will deliver your emails in the evening to make sure they receive them when they’re free. Besides that, if you’re targeting teenagers, you should go for eye-catching, colorful email templates to keep them hooked to your content.
The more customizations you conduct according to each segment, the higher your engagement rates and sales conversions.
Steer Away From the Norm
As mentioned, even though this technique is effective, it is rapidly going stale. Today’s audience probably knows all the basic gimmicks of personalized emails and runs from such attention-grabbing campaigns.
However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give your ideal buyer persona a try. Instead, use creative and intelligent ways to personalize your messages.
This way, you’ll be able to generate new leads and nurture potential prospects without boring your audience with the same old tactics.
Make a point to monitor, test, and refine your tactics constantly. Find out what made your previous campaigns work or fail and build further upon those foundations. This will ensure that each email campaign targeting buyer personas will perform better than the last.
Most importantly, make your email list your top priority. If a visitor has taken their time to provide you with their email address, it means they want to hear from you. Now, delivering irrelevant content can discourage a potentially profitable lead right out of your grasp.
Key Takeaways
For those asking what persona-based email marketing is, the answer is simple: it’s a technique that sets your campaign apart from generic automated emails and helps you retain old customers while acquiring new ones.
You have to use your customer data productively to create an ideal buyer persona for your blog or business. Additionally, make multiple personas to segment your customers and deliver tailor-made content that provides value.
Effectively integrate this technique, and it will probably be one of the most effective marketing techniques you have implemented on your website.
If you need help implementing and segmenting buyer personas for your email marketing efforts, contact the email marketing experts at Sapper Consulting!
