Consistently sending the same message will eventually damage your brand reputation, increase unsubscribes, and ultimately hold up conversions. Sales will dip and profits will suffer. All because you failed to engage customers enough.

Targeted emails don’t have to be complicated or hyper-personalized works of art. Successful email marketing strategies are all about understanding and catering to your audience’s individual needs and preferences. Read on to learn four key benefits of targeted email marketing. These benefits will revolutionize your campaigns and boost your business growth.

What is targeted email marketing?

We all know that email marketing is the most successful channel available to marketers today. Email marketing offers $42 ROI for every $1 spent. But that’s just the beginning of what’s possible.

You can significantly improve your ROI, sales, and profits by adopting targeted email marketing.

Targeted email marketing is a way of ensuring your emails make an impact in the inbox. Using the information you already hold about your customers, you can send tailored messages to specific sets of subscribers. You target them.

To improve your email marketing strategy, it’s important to segment and personalize based on customer information like their interests, age, and gender. This level of personalization impresses readers and improves their experience with your brand. This increases the likelihood that they’ll act on your calls to action and remain loyal customers.

4 benefits of targeted email marketing

Let’s look at these four benefits of targeted email marketing…

Improve relevancy

Segmentation ensures you’re sending a more relevant message to your audience. You can divide your customer base into distinct groups based on shared characteristics, such as demographics, preferences, past purchase behavior, or engagement history. 

By categorizing customers into these segments, you can tailor your email campaigns to address the unique needs, desires, and expectations of each specific group. Customers who receive relevant content are more likely to engage with your email marketing efforts. Customers will click and convert because targeted emails appeal to their goals and offer value to them.

It’s most effective to gather information and segment new subscribers through their welcome program. You should regularly prompt customers during their customer journey to update their marketing preferences.

Segmentation is an essential and under-utilized email marketing tactic and helps build stronger connections with your audience. But, the more you segment and target your audience, the better your results will be.

Increase ROI

Sending targeted and personalized emails leads to higher engagement rates and increased sales conversions. With more customers converting, your revenue will naturally rise. By understanding your customers’ preferences and needs, you can provide them with targeted discounts and promotions that cater to their interests. This approach allows you to deliver the appropriate message at the right moment, resulting in higher customer engagement. When you deliver relevant messages, engaged readers convert faster. And more conversions mean more revenue.

If you know customers are interested in a specific product range, target them with offers that appeal to them. Even basic segmentation such as age and gender significantly affects your ROI. Marketers can enjoy ROI increases of up to 760% when sending targeted, segmented campaigns.

Better customer relationships

We’ve already mentioned that improved relevancy in your emails will demonstrate your brand’s value to the customer. In the long run, it will also help you build and nurture long-term relationships with your customers. 

When you know your customers and segment and personalize your emails accordingly, customers will hold your marketing in high regard. By regularly sending relevant content, customers will develop high expectations from your emails. The more you meet – and exceed – these expectations, the more their trust and respect for your brand will increase.

Longer customer retention

Targeted email marketing not only makes building relationships with subscribers easier; it also makes retaining them easier. 

Creating personalized and targeted email marketing campaigns can greatly enhance customer retention. It’s important to build strong relationships with both potential and existing customers by continuously learning about their preferences and optimizing your email campaigns. 

By doing so, you increase engagement and ensure your customers receive value from your emails. This fosters loyalty and customer satisfaction, ultimately leading to repeat purchases and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

Shoppers who value your experiences will seek you out, in and out of the inbox. If you replicate these experiences in your cross-channel marketing they’ll think about you first, every time.

Optimize for ultimate success

It’s important to optimize your marketing strategy as customers’ needs and goals change with every conversion. Encourage customers to update their marketing preferences and keep track of email marketing metrics such as opens, click-through rates, and ROI to determine which tactics are most effective. Adjust your campaigns accordingly to align with your customer’s interests and behaviors.

Summary

By using targeted email marketing strategies you can connect with your audience, increase ROI, build stronger customer relationships, and improve retention rates. It’s a powerful tool that can significantly impact your digital marketing efforts. To stay ahead of the competition, it’s highly recommended to invest in targeted email marketing strategies to take your marketing campaigns to the next level.

Ecommerce merchants have the tools they need at their fingertips. Customers are willing to give you the data you need to deliver relevant messages that meet their needs. Marketing automation and ecommerce store platforms collect data about browsing behaviors that ensure you can send targeted and relevant communications when the time is right.

Like dotdigital’s new eRFM customer modeling tool, new tech makes it even easier for merchants to recognize customer intent and utilize these moments to generate more sales.

Customer intent for ecommerce marketing

Why is customer intent important?

Being able to identify moments in the customers’ journey where they’re preparing to act is vital. It enables ecommerce merchants to pinpoint key stages where customers will be most susceptible to your marketing.

eRFM customer modeling looks at a customer’s RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary value) score and adds engagements such as email opens and online browsing. Using this you can keep track of customers as they begin to show signs of intent to buy.

You can build dynamic segments based on eRFM scores to target customers on the verge of conversion or on the edge of unengagement. Pulling in new data every day, this customer modeling tool ensures you never miss an opportunity to act on customer intent.

5 ecommerce campaigns to drive conversions and sales

Using the tools at your fingertips you can create campaigns designed to target the right customer at the right time. eRFM segments help you understand which stage of the journey your customer is at. This makes it easier than ever to design automated email marketing campaigns that are relevant and timely.

1. The welcome program

Welcome emails are a central pillar in ecommerce email marketing.

They experience higher open rates and engagement rates than any other email campaign. Signing up to receive your email marketing is a clear indication that your new customer is ready to take action. Triggering this series as early as possible ensures you are acting on this intent.

Discount codes, clear CTAs, and options to update preferences are essential for this campaign. But most of you will probably have had these running for a while. So how can we shake things up?

At the early stage, you probably won’t have a lot of data on your customers. This makes sending highly relevant communication tough, but not impossible.

Even if they’ve not bought anything with your brand before, your eRFM model will let you know which of your new recruits are most engaged with your marketing and which are not. You can create new branches in your welcome program to deliver different messages to those of have or haven’t opened your email.

2. Abandoned cart email series

Like welcome programs, abandoned cart emails are a guaranteed money-maker for ecommerce marketers.

Triggered by customers’ actions, these emails are timely and relevant when built correctly. Emails that land within 30 minutes of cart abandonment generated more opens, better clicks, and higher sales. By arriving quickly, you’re recognizing that the customer intends to make a purchase. A well-timed prompt is all they need to return to your website and close the sale.

Using eRFM segments you can target your abandoned cart emails depending on their level of engagement with your brand. First purchase intent should be taken seriously by every ecommerce merchant.

This is the first step towards creating a loyal customer. Use your abandoned cart program to offer coupon codes and drive first-time buyers to make a purchase by providing information about shipping and returns policies.

3. Aftersales campaign

Aftersales care is often a stage forgotten or neglected by ecommerce marketers.

Beyond transactional emails such as order confirmations and shipping notices, you are missing out big time if you’re not delivering engaging and relevant content post-purchase. While these emails can take many forms, you should focus your attention on creating quality content that improves the shopper’s experience.

Provide customers with tips about how to care for their new items or hints about how to get the most out of your products. This will boost their overall experience but will offer you the chance to cross- and upsell your products. AI-powered product recommendations can surface catalog items based on past purchases to drive customers to make another purchase.

Using eRFM you can build segments of customers to showing signs of intent to make a second purchase. Promoting, cross- and upselling items using AI-powered product recommendations prompt the reader back to your website to make that all-important second purchase.

4. Loyalty campaign

All marketers, ecommerce or not, know that it’s cheaper to keep exiting customers than to acquire new ones.

Loyalty campaigns are essential for maintaining high levels of customer engagement. The more engaged customers are, the more they’ll continue to turn to your brand when they need to shop. Rewarding shoppers for their loyalty through points and coupon codes typically keep engagement levels high, but it’s not a guarantee.

While typically low-maintenance, loyal customers still need your attention. eRFM allows you to identify loyal customers who are showing signs of low engagement. When your loyal customers stop opening your emails, it’s time to act. This is a key segment you do not want to lose.

Creating a separate branch in your loyalty program designed to reconnect with this segment will help you maintain customer loyalty.

5. Re-engagement campaign

While list churn is an accepted aspect of marketing, it’s not one we enjoy.

Re-engagement campaigns are all about reminding customers why they chose to sign-up for your marketing in the first place. Showcasing your bestsellers and demonstrating your brand value is essential in a re-engagement campaign.

To achieve success with this campaign, it’s essential to be timely, to target customers early before they’ve disengaged completely. By using eRFM, you can create specific re-engagement campaigns based on how much they have lapsed. A customer who was once a high spender can be targeted with a discount coupon, as they have a higher likelihood to convert. Customers who are not likely to spend as much can be targeted with product recommendations or CTA to update marketing preferences.

Lead generation for B2B marketers

Lead generation is fundamental to the success of B2B brands. It helps you identify the ideal customers for your products or services, then attract them and drive them to buy. It’s an essential activity that unites B2B sales and marketing teams as they work towards their single goal.

The first stage of lead generation involves collecting data on your potential customers. This information could include name, email, company name, job title, sector, and more. This will help you get to know your prospects and enable you to send increasingly personalized marketing as your relationship develops.

After you’ve collected this data, you need to nurture these leads to get them into a place where they’re ready to convert. This generally involved using marketing automation to warm leads until they’re ready to be passed to your sales team.

The ultimate goal of lead generation is to create a consistent pipeline of high-quality prospects ready to convert into customers.

5 email marketing campaigns that generate strong leads

To ensure you’re only qualifying the highest quality leads, you need to be running campaigns that engage prospects.

Email marketing for B2B brands is the strongest channel in your toolkit. Omnichannel marketing automation platforms empower B2B marketers with greater insights into customer data. With this, you’ll be able to deliver personalized, targeted content in your email marketing campaigns.

Your strategy and tactics will vary significantly depending on your industry and product or service offering. Think of the campaigns below as your list of ingredients, it’s up to you to decide how to put the recipe together but we’ve selected those guaranteed to engage audiences to produce stronger leads.

1. Welcome series

Your welcome series is one of the most important automation campaigns you can send.

It’s your first chance to really introduce yourself to a new prospect. In a welcome series, you should be introducing your brand, outlining your value proposition, and setting clear expectations for your readers.

By doing this, you’re demonstrating your brand’s integrity. You’re being open and honest from your very first interaction and this will establish a strong relationship right from the very beginning.

You’re also contacting leads at the time when they are most engaged with your brand. Welcome emails enjoy a significantly higher open rate because they arrive in subscribers’ inboxes at the point of sign-up. Therefore, they’re actively engaged and looking forward to your emails.

Prospects who receive a welcome email will experience significantly higher levels of engagement with your brand, simply by starting it off right.

2. Activation emails

Once you’ve engaged your new prospects with your welcome series, the natural next step is your activation series. This helps new customers learn about your products or services while allowing you to get to know them.

You should use your activation series as a way to get to know new leads. As well as introducing your brand offering, you should use this series to learn about their interests and needs. Gathering preferences is essential.

Marketing preferences will be critical to creating stronger leads. Collecting them will enable you to send personalized marketing. The more you’re able to deliver targeted and relevant content related to the prospect’s journey, the more they’ll view your brand as one that will consistently meet their needs.

3. Lead nurturing

As B2B marketers, you know the importance of lead nurturing. On average, nurtured leads create 20% more sales opportunities than non-nurtured leads. But nurturing leads is often a labor-intensive tactic. It requires knowledge and understanding of your potential customers.

And that’s exactly where your omnichannel marketing automation platform comes into play. By combining marketing preferences with lead scoring, you can create a clear, well-rounded picture of your customers, their interests, and their needs. This is all you need to build a powerful lead nurture automation program.

Prospects expect and interact with different types of content at different stages of their journey. Lead scoring can help you understand where your leads are and trigger specific campaigns as they progress through your customer lifecycle. Armed with an understanding of what they’re looking for from your brand, you can ensure you’re delivering rich, nurturing content guaranteed to drive them towards conversion.

4. ABM

The key to successful account-based marketing (ABM) lies in your curated content. You need to deliver content that appeals directly to the accounts you’re targeting.

When putting together your ABM strategy, you should group prospects based on their shared traits. For example, you may decide to target 50 brands that deliver catering services. This will make it easier for you to deliver curated content designed to address their specific pain points and demonstrate the value your brand can offer.

ABM campaigns are strong converters as they engage prospects on an unprecedented one-to-one scale. Not only are you demonstrating your understanding of their needs, but you’re also providing clear solutions to their problems.

5. Loyalty program

Modern customers want their relationships with brands to be two-way streets. If they’re going to do business with you, they want to know what they’re getting out of it.

Of course, you’re already demonstrating this through your personalized and targeted lead nurturing campaigns. Potential customers know you will be providing them with an excellent service solving their specific pain points. But they will be strong, more loyal customers if they see your brand going over and above to satisfy them.

Thankfully, achieving this is easier than it sounds. A loyalty program is a surefire way to win over prospects. Rewarding content downloads, social posts, and referrals are great ways to turn a prospect into a customer, and a customer into a brand advocate.

Taking your next steps in B2B marketing

Now you’ve been inspired by some powerful marketing automation campaigns to generate stronger leads. Next, you need to think about how you’re going to drive these prospects to convert and how to keep them as long-term clients.

By diving into the modern customer’s lifecycle, you can automate every stage of the journey to save yourself time and make money. Check out our latest B2B marketing cheatsheet to discover how.

83% of business buyers say that being treated like a person, and not a number, is very important to winning their business.

The notion that price is the most important influence on B2B buying decisions couldn’t be further from the truth; in fact it only contributes towards 20% of the decision, whereas customer experience now influences 80% of buying decisions. And that’s why in this blog, I’m going to cover three strategies to improve your customer experience, helping you grow sustainably and beat the competition.

1. Capture valuable data

87% of marketers consider data to be their most underutilized asset. It comes as no surprise that one of the biggest pain points I come across when speaking to those in the industry, is the inability to access and action their data. It almost goes without saying that your data capture needs to be a smooth and easy process for the buyer. Whether that’s through a popover on your website, a ‘contact us’ form, or a newsletter sign-up, try to gradually acquire data from the buyer rather than bombarding them with one big form. At the end of the day, data capture is what enables you to successfully implement all the following strategies, so you must make sure you nail it!

2. Personalize your content

Personalization seems to be all anyone talks about these days, but there is a reason for all the preaching – it really does help to drive ROI. Remember when I said that 83% of B2B buyers want to be treated as a person? Well, personalizing your content is a big step in the right direction. A personalized experience is a proven way to increase the overall customer experience, which we know now makes up 80% of B2B buying decisions. To do this we need to utilize that valuable data we have captured, think about combining explicit and implicit data to ensure the most personalized experience. The obvious first points you’ll be utilizing will be: name, title, company, then to take it to the next level you’ll want to be tracking web sessions to get a deeper understanding of what your buyer is looking at within your website.

The use of dynamic content is a must for personalization, simply because it allows you to scale with ease, leverage data like average order value or contract end date, and tailor the message you are trying to get across to that particular person. An example I frequently see is discounting. You may, for example, be willing to discount a little more freely for a business with a higher average order value than another.

Personalization can also come in the form of lead scoring. I know that when I’m working on leads within our CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365, the content I’m going to send to a particular person always differs depending on the lead score they have achieved. For example, someone with a low lead score may need a little more nurturing through helpful content, compared to that of a prospect with a higher lead score. Someone who is more engaged with your brand may benefit from a triggered SMS as they are more likely to respond.

3. Leverage omnichannel marketing

It’s no secret that omnichannel is leading the way in the customer engagement space, however a lot of companies I talk to are often limited by their own tech stack. I often ask, “What’s your omnichannel strategy currently look like?” The answer I hear a lot is – “it’s not as good as it could be” This leaves a golden opportunity to fully leverage omnichannel and get ahead of your competitors.

We know that brands who adopt an omnichannel strategy are 89% more likely to retain their customers compared to the 33% who don’t. There are countless use cases of ways to utilize more channels to move leads down the funnel faster, eliminate no shows, and improve ROI. My personal favorite is the use of SMS. SMS can penetrate the noise better than any other channel; it’s direct, and the near-perfect engagement score – a read rate of 98% – isn’t easily beaten.

While I do love SMS let’s not forget about live chat. Did you know 78% of B2B customers buy from the first brand to respond to their questions?

Brands need to look closely at how decision makers are engaging with them and respond accordingly. Depending on the industry, that first touch point might just be a question they need answered on the fly via live chat, saving them having to pick up the phone and talk to someone.

44% of B2B marketers report that the main reason they abandon websites is that there’s no contact info immediately available. I know that from my experience with live chat at Dotdigital, we have a number of new business leads that get transferred over to the sales team from prospects asking questions on the go. These are opportunities that we would undoubtedly miss out on if we didn’t use that particular channel.

To summarize, the three strategies to help you enhance customer experience and enable sustainable business growth are:

• Capturing valuable data: The data you capture facilitates everything you do! Make sure you reduce barriers for your buyers to provide that data by ensuring it’s a smooth and easy process for them.
• Personalizing content: Customer experience is key. Deliver a highly personalized experience that blows your buyers away.
• Leveraging omnichannel marketing: Nowadays one touch point isn’t enough. Engage with your customer across several channels to convert leads faster, eliminate no shows, and improve ROI.

Setting up marketing automations

Adapting to a changing situation

A results-driven approach pays off

Because brands that don’t take their customer engagement further, and follow up after a purchase, will lose more customers quicker in the long run.

What should brands include in their post-purchase email marketing?

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you send triggered emails following a purchase to reassure customers and build customer loyalty?
• Are your customers kept informed on the progress of their online order, through the use of timely emails?
• Does your marketing team send customers targeted, follow-up email marketing messages within four weeks of their online purchase. Is the content based on the item they purchased?

Do it like Amazon

Amazon sets the post-sale experience bar really high. That’s why customers keep coming back for more.

So why does Amazon get it so right?

For one, customers are super-receptive to post-sale email marketing. But unlike Amazon, many retails don’t take full advantage of this period to create customer loyalty and drive more additional revenue. Those that do use the opportunity to serve customers some engaging and relevant content, which adds value to the purchase they made. Things like:

• simple, relevant order updates
• useful delivery information
• bringing products to life through storytelling
• offering help if something goes wrong
• asking for feedback on product and service
• cross-upselling to complement the experience

All these points have one thing in common: they meet those all-important future expectations. Whether it’s updating customers on what they need to know when, connecting through different channels, or renewing delightful customer experiences, Amazon hits the nail on the head. You can too.

Post-sale email marketing best practice

• Invite website users to sign up to your email marketing/e-newsletters while they are in the checkout process. Users are engaged with your site and products at this point, so are likely to subscribe to future offers.

• Use the checkout process to incentivize customers to sign up to your email marketing. Offer them loyalty points, discounts off future purchases, or exclusive special offers or previews when they subscribe.

• Send a triggered order confirmation email immediately after an online purchase. This is expected behavior and failure to do so may result in order cancellations.

• Send a triggered ‘item dispatched’ email. Keeping customers informed on the status of their order helps to build trust, loyalty, referrals, and repeat purchases.

• Send targeted post-sale email marketing campaigns, based on the items a recipient ordered. Once you know what a customer has ordered, you have the chance to begin targeting offers that will help drive upsell, cross-sell, and repeat purchases. Don’t waste this chance – use effective product recommendations like ‘best next’, ‘also bought’, and more.

• Use customer surveys as part of your post-sale messages to collect valuable data on the customer experience and help build loyalty and trust.

What to look for in an omnichannel marketing provider

Your cross-channel marketing automation provider should enable you to import transactional data so you can segment post-sale email marketing campaigns based on purchase activity. Plus, you should be able to send different content to different groups of purchasers, e.g. male vs. female, clothing vs. household goods, etc.

Look for a solution that can also enable you to set up dynamic content based on your customers’ transactional data and automatically target aftersales content and offers.

Want more post-sale email marketing advice? Check out our guide on post-purchase marketing here.

In 2010, we wrote a blog on ‘5 Steps to Ensure Spot-On ROI Tracking’, which looked at how even though overall UK marketing spend fell in the final 3 months of 2009, it was expected to increase in 2010, including email marketing, for the first time since early 2007.

Well, four years later, the latest research from the DMA’s annual National client email report found that “more than half of UK client-side email marketers anticipate increasing their 2014 email expenditure, after ROI for the channel reached 2,500% in 2013. (Source)

And according to MarketingCharts, “8 in 10 US marketers who responded to an Adobe survey agree that there is more pressure to show return on investment on marketing spend”.

So, with that in mind, here are some thoughts on how you should be tracking and measuring the ROI from your email marketing and how you can improve it.

Set goals

Like any other marketing activity, you need to set goals for your email marketing that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed.  These goals should go deeper than the process metrics like opens and clicks that are easy to track. They should be based on the performance metrics that are true indicators of success for your business.  You can then work backwards to see how the process metrics correlate and identify which are the best indicators of true success.

Track your customer journeys – from email through to purchase

Site tracking enriches your data and your understanding of your contact’s engagement with your site.

By tracking certain pages of your website, you can track which pages your contacts go to after clicking a link in your email.  Your email service provider (ESP) should be able to provide you with a piece of JavaScript code that you can add to your web pages and this site tracking information is then provided within the reporting area against the relevant campaign

What to do with this ROI information?

Split testing on ROI as a metric is extremely powerful as it enables you to increase the effectiveness of your campaign.

Most ESPs will give you the power to test subject lines, content, friendly from names and from addresses for open or click performance. While these will give you some insight, most of us make no money from these process metrics and we need to be looking at these tests in the context of sales and ROI, whether that is units sold, revenue, AOV or order frequency.

How to improve your ROI from email marketing

Once you have a better understanding of your email marketing’s performance, you can benchmark your metrics against previous periods and start looking at ways to improve it going forward. To start, have a look at these key factors:

• Segment your data to send relevant emails
• Use marketing automation to be proactively reactive. In other words, use automation to immediately react to strong buying indicators with programs such as abandoned browse, abandoned basket and thank you messages with cross-selling up-sell offers. Split test your emails to see what works best for you, including subject lines, friendly from name, creative and from address
•  Test different landing pages and see what resonates with your audience best

Tools in Dotdigital that make it happen

For a while now in Dotdigital, you can set up site and ROI tracking. If you haven’t already, find out how to here

ROI Split Testing

A new feature to Dotdigital’s split testing functionality enables you to measure winning split test campaigns on ROI data, not just the amount of clicks and opens. If you’re using our site and ROI tracking, you can start using this immediately. Read more in our blog post and forum.

Is there another way?

By now you might be thinking this assumes all of my email marketing is done in a vacuum – that none of my other marketing influences this behavior.  Attribution could be the topic of a whole book, not to mention another post. In short you are correct, as this uses last touch attribution. In our experience, it is not a perfect system but it is directionally accurate. In some cases, email gets the credit at the expense of other channels but this balances out with those situations where the other channels get credit at the expense of email.

If you are not comfortable with this, there is another way to look at it. Instead of focusing on the value-driven by a campaign, turn the question around to look at the value of your email list as an asset to the business.  This can be measured simply by taking the revenue generated by those customers for whom you have an email address, which gives you the value of the list. You then divide this value by the number of addresses, which gives the value of each address.