Is your email list building strategy part of your inbound marketing?
It should be.
Email is a separate inbound marketing channel and more effective channel for lead nurturing. Your inbound marketing strategy encompasses lead generation, nurturing, and conversion. So, how good are your email lists?
Don’t just spray and pray — blasting emails and hoping your subscribers love it. Instead, if you segment your list using these three categories, you will almost immediately see an increase in the conversion rate, an inbound marketing goal.
Targeting email campaigns on demographics
Chances are you already have a number of these details. You either asked for them upfront with user sign-up or through form submissions in another of your inbound marketing campaigns.
Details like:
- Birthdays
- Date of subscription
- Postal code
- Gender
- Job description/salary range/managerial position in the B2B world
- Type of company they work for
These innocent details can give your emails much wanted personalization and punch. For instance:
- Send month-long bonuses and discounts to users when it’s their birthday
- Initiate discount drives weeks before a subscriber’s sign-up anniversary
- If your business has many physical stores or offices, include the closest one in your correspondence based on postal code
- Email content that is gender-focused
Obviously each business and business model is different, but you get the point. The simplest of segments can already improve your email efforts and help maximize your inbound marketing strategy.
Target your email campaigns based on behavior
Most of the top email service providers have a variety of features that allow you to track different statistics and information about how your users behave when receiving your emails.
It’s like website analytics for inbound marketing. Do they immediately delete them? Do they open it at all? Do they read the entire email? Do they click on buttons and links? Which ones? Based on these details, you can further segment your email list.
For instance:
- You can send follow-up emails on subject matter or offers relevant to the content users clicked on previously sent emails
- You can tweak the times you send your emails based on data from your provider on when your subscribers open your messages
- You can target your messages based on how recently or how frequently a visitor has come to your site. Have a lead or customer who hasn’t visited you for a while? Offer them a special incentive to come back.
- You can even experiment on different email subject lines based on open rates — emails not opened probably didn’t have enticing enough subjects to merit interest
Take note that your segments can overlap. Your first segment that segregates groups based on demographics and personal details can be bolstered by your segment based on email reading behavior. The kind of data overreach is critical to a smart email inbound marketing campaign.
Using conversions to drive email marketing campaigns
For websites and businesses that deal with e-commerce or similar business models, your email list are also your ‘shoppers’ — emails used to log in and shop online.
You can use each conversion as a way to segment your lists. You can segregate your users based on what they buy, and then create campaigns to up-sell (users who bought once are more likely to buy again as repeat customers) or cross-sell (offer items relevant to what they purchased; think Amazon’s section for “people who bought this item also looked at…”).
You can do the same for micro-conversions too, depending on your inbound marketing strategy.
There are of course a lot of other ways to segment lists, but these will get you started.
The more effective segments you create, the better your email campaigns and the greater results in your over inbound marketing plan.
Remember: focus and filter; don’t spray and pray!
