Less than 50 Percent of Businesses Use Targeted Email Marketing Techniques

While there are many benefits of email marketing it can be a double-edged sword. That’s because it’s easy to annoy potential customers (i.e. leads) with irrelevant emails. And, once annoyed, they’ll unsubscribe and it’s hard to win them back.

Happily, there’s one email marketing technique that can help keep you from annoying your leads: targeted email marketing. By segmenting your email list, you can send relevant emails to individual groups of subscribers, an approach which has proven to be very effective. While an irrelevant mail might slip through here and there, the likelihood is much lower.

According to the Email Marketing & Marketing Automation Excellence 2017 Report however, less than 50 percent of businesses are using any kind of targeted email marketing technique at all, and that means they’re missing out on opportunities.

Less than 50 Percent of Businesses Use Targeted Email Marketing Techniques
Source: Email Marketing & Marketing Automation Excellence 2017 Report

Two Top Benefits of Using Targeted Email Marketing Techniques

Aside from lowering the annoyance factor that drives potential customers away, using email list segmentation to target your leads offers two particular benefits.

Email Campaign Effectiveness

Overall, the numbers show that segmenting your email list is more effective than not:

Opens: 69 percent higher than non-segmented campaigns,
Unique Opens: 29 percent higher than non-segmented campaigns,
Clicks: 42.64 percent higher than non-segmented campaigns,
Abuse Reports: 55 percent lower than non-segmented campaigns,
Unsubscribes: 23 percent lower than non-segmented campaigns.

Sales Numbers

Using segmentation to target your email subscribers has also been shown to increase sales. In a study conducted by Optimove, it was found that the smaller the segment, the tighter the targeting, the greater the impact on sales:

Two Top Benefits of Using Targeted Email Marketing Techniques

Source: Optimove. Data set: 30 million customers and 2,000 campaigns.

One Thing To Be Aware of When Using Targeted Email Techniques

Another finding in the Optimove study mentioned above was, when it comes to sales, not all segmentation groups are created equal. Campaigns to some of your groups will lead to much greater sales than others.

One Thing To Be Aware of When Using Targeted Email Techniques

Source: Optimove.

It’s important to note however that, on average, targeted email marketing via segmentation lead to $14 more in sales per subscriber.

This is where lead scoring really helps. By scoring your leads, you can identify the segments that are most likely to buy your products and services, which in turn, enables you to effectively target those leads.

Two Steps to Using Targeted Email Marketing Techniques

Build Your Email Marketing List

The first step in targeted email marketing is to build your list. Here are two links to tips that will help you do just that:

Create Your Targeted Email Marketing Segments

As you build you list, you’ll be able to gather information about your leads. That information will form the basis of your segments. Click on the links below to discover some common, and not so common, ways to target your email list subscribers:

In addition, you can use various automated marketing techniques to create segments on the fly based on data your marketing automation system has collected about each lead.

A Final Word on Targeted Email Marketing

While you don’t have to go all gung-ho, your small business should implement at least the basic level of targeted email marketing. It’s an approach that can really move the needle and, it doesn’t take much investment in terms of either time or money.

Dart Photo via Shutterstock

This article, “Less than 50 Percent of Businesses Use Targeted Email Marketing Techniques” was first published on Small Business Trends