Author: David James

Should You Target Your Email Campaigns?

One of the primary challenges of the email marketer is to make their content as relevant to the reader as possible.  By presenting pertinent information which is useful to the readers, we slowly build a trust between them and your company.  So often it is the case that our lists become too large in order to fully take advantage of specific marketing techniques.  That is why from the very start, when the list is first being developed, it may prove more profitable to divide a list into distinct groups of readers who are looking for different types of content.  This division allows for targeted campaigns which have proven to be very effective at driving sales.

For example, if an online discount store sells everything from apparel to electronics, it is probably beneficial to give readers an option to sign up for email offers from specific categories.  For while some customers may use the site to purchase discounted electronics, these customers will more than likely have no interest whatsoever in purchasing clothing from the same store.  And sending them emails which market things that they don’t want, or need, will greatly improve the chances of them unsubscribing from your list in the future.

Another strategy is to simply track the links which customers click on in emails that bring them back to the website.  There are various email list analytics programs which can help businesses to gather this type of information in a matter of minutes.  You can gauge the popularity of your content by seeing which type of link drove the most traffic back to your site.  From there, it is just a matter of presenting similar content in order to further increase your response and drive more sales.  Again, the idea is to improve relevancy and thus make it more likely for the subscriber to actually read your email and purchase something.

Of course, over optimization is just as bad as sending out bulk emails.  In fact, it could be worse.  No matter how relevant the subject may be to the reader, they probably don’t want to see page after page about the same narrow topic over and over again.  Let’s say that, for example, you have a foodies list to which you occasionally send recipes.  You’ve tracked the readers’ interest using the click thru strategy discussed above.  What you discovered is that sloppy joe recipes were the most popular for this list.  Now it would make little sense to just begin sending out various sloppy joe recipes every week as part of an email campaign.  Instead it may be more appropriate to focus on recipes which contain ground beef instead.  In that way, you’re still improving relevancy but not so much as to limit the possible content.

Targeting is relatively simple to accomplish with just a little planning and forethought.  The ultimate measure of whether or not an email list is targeted enough is the response of the customers.  If you already have a healthy response rate, then more than likely you’ve targeted the content and offers perfectly given the makeup of your list. In this case, you should be happy with the results.  If you aren’t getting the expected response, however, then you may take the simple steps outlined above in order to increase relevancy of the content over time and hopefully improve the response.  Only then will you see an increase in click thrus and ultimately sales.

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Publisher and President of Bethesda Emedia Marketing and Bethesda List Center, David James offers many years of experience in direct marketing, eMail marketing and social media marketing.

Both organizations work with business-to-business marketers, medical and life science, associations, publishers and the like. Follow David on Twitter as well! djamesbethesda

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Image courtesy of (Stuart Miles) from freedigitalphotos