The Importance of Market Segmentation in order to address to innovative opportunities

The Importance of Market Segmentation in order to address to innovative opportunities

How to Personalize Your Email Messages

Using personalization in email messages is important because it will help you build an audience of people who trust you. Email is the perfect way to build a relationship because you have fast access to the individual. Even if you have 1,000,000 subscribers, you can treat each recipient as an individual by using simple personalization techniques.

There are several factors that make for a truly personalized email message.

• The Subject Line – Making a subject line stand out to the recipient will encourage them to open it. You can personalize it by adding their name using your auto responder’s features to the subject line, or by simply using terminology that would be personal to the list member within the subject line.
• The Salutation – When you send email messages to your list members, it’s important to use the salutation as an opportunity for personalization. You can add their name, their position, title, or whatever you want that is pertinent to them if you have collected the information when they signed up for your email list.
• Your Return Email Address – Many marketers make a huge mistake using so called “no-reply” email addresses to send marketing messages. If you truly want to use email as a way to build relationships, then you’ll need to include your real name and a real email address instead of being so secretive. People want to know you, and relationship marketing requires it.
• Your Email Signature – Be personal with your email signature, too. Include an image of yourself, and a catchy sign off. Most of all, you must be yourself. Try adding other ways to contact you in your signature like social media channels.
• Know Your Audience – One of the first ways to make your audience feel important, and to make yourself into someone your audience wants to know, is to know who they are. After all, it’s always about them, not you. The more you can know them, the more your messages will resonate to them.

Using all of these factors is important in relationship marketing. Get to know your audience, let them get to know you. Use the software you choose, such as Aweber or MailChimp to its fullest potential by using automatic personalization features and only sending messages that add value to your audience.

The Importance of Market Segmentation

One way to truly ramp up relationship building and personalization is to learn how to segment your market. The smaller the groups that you can break down your audience into, the more personalized and direct the messages you send can be. Plus, if you can think outside the box a little bit about the type of groups you create, you’ll be able to go even further with segmentation.

• There is No Such Thing as One-Size-Fits-All – You already know this intuitively or by experience. But it’s not just clothing, it’s also very true of email marketing messages. When you send out generic messages hoping something sticks, you’re really just wasting your time and your audience’s time and lowering the results of your efforts.
• In Some Cases Timing Is Everything – When you segment a list properly, those who prefer to read messages at 8 a.m. will appreciate getting them at 7:59 a.m. Whereas those who open messages at 10 a.m. will also enjoy getting your messages when it’s convenience to them, but you can’t do that if you’re trying to do a “one-size-fits-all” message. You’ll miss out on conversions that could have been easy to get.
• You Can Make Each Message Count – When you segment lists appropriately, such as buyers of widget A from buyers of widget B, or customers from leads and leads from prospects, you’ll be much more likely to move them from one list to another seamlessly because you can avoid sending repeated messages or offering them services or products they already have or simply aren’t interested in.
• You’ll Build Your Reputation & Brand Faster – The more your audience feels as if you just really get them, and understand them, the faster they’ll go from seeing you as unknown to known, and the faster you’ll reach a space of trust and even like so that they want to buy what you’re offering because they know it’s right for them.
• You’ll Simply Get Better Results – Study after study conducted shows that market segmentation works and that marketers who practice it are seeing much higher results than those who aren’t. What’s more, with today’s technology it’s not even difficult to set up. If you have an autoresponder program like Aweber or MailChimp you already own the technology to make it happen.

The awesome thing is, most email marketing software will take care of this for you once you set up the rules. After the audiences are segmented, you’ll need to plan out the specific messages to send to each group, and this may take more time, but you’ll be able to reap the benefits of this after it’s set up, automatically.

8 Ways to Segment Your List

Once you understand the importance of market segmentation to relationship marketing, you’ll want to figure out different ways to segment your list. How you segment is very personal to your niche, your products and / or services, but this list might give you some ideas.

1. Demographics – This is a pretty obvious segment idea but it will work for some marketers. How much people make, their sex, their age, and so forth can make a big difference in how they read an email. If you have customers in their 20’s and 60’s who buy your product, you will need to market to them in different ways. Think “Dove”, and act accordingly.
2. Location – In many cases location doesn’t matter, but in some cases it will make a difference in how you word your emails. If you’re international, there may be some locations where you want to use British English and some cases where you want to use American English because that’s how your audience will feel most heard and most engaged. If you have a local business, this will play an even larger factor in segmenting your list.
3. Customers – People who have already bought from you should be treated differently and sent totally different messages than people who have never bought something from you. There is a big difference between someone who downloaded your free report and someone who purchased a product or service from you.
4. Prospects vs. Leads – This is a mistake a lot of people make when they’re fresh to the marketing game but one you should not make. You’re hearing it here. A prospect is someone who is simply in your target audience, but a lead is someone who has also expressed interest and admitted to needing what you offer. The messages should be completely different.
5. Fans – Some people are just your loyal fans who often promote you to others, share what you have to say, follow you on social media and even advocate for you to others. When a person shows this side of themselves, they should be on a very specially segmented list that gets more attention.
6. Purchase Behavior – This one is simple, because it means your audience did something to move from one list to another. Perhaps they downloaded your free offer, and then they purchased your paid offer. Move them from your lead list (downloaded free offer) to your customer list (bought item A). Now you can market to them item B in an even more personalized way.
7. Customer Buying Cycle – If you know where your audience member is in the buying cycle you can nurture them in a special way as to move them through the buying cycle smoothly. Everyone starts out as a prospect, which requires marketing that is different from a lead that is different from a customer. If someone is in the learning mode, they’re not ready for your buy now offer.
8. Persona – When you create buyer personas or avatars you will create more than one. Usually you’ll want to create two or three possible personas to which you’ll send marketing messages. These people will join your list based on those messages via your blog, social media, sales pages, freebie offers and so forth. They should forever remain separate in your marketing messages because you’ll be able to personalize the messages more, thus enabling you to build even tighter relationships.

Finally, if someone is an affiliate or referring partner, they should be on yet another list entirely, which you’ll learn about in the next section where you’ll learn that you really need more than one list.

Why You Need More Than One List

If you realize the importance of setting up different landing pages for different types of audiences, then it’s going to make total sense to you why you really need more than one email list. But, just in case you didn’t know that, let’s talk about how important it is to have more than one list and why you need to do it.

Determine Audience Motivation

Having one general list ignores some important information about your audience, such as what motivates them? What makes them want to take that next step? Why did they sign up for your list? If you put everyone who downloaded freebie A with everyone who downloaded freebie B you are missing the point. You want to keep people on different lists based on how they sign up because how they sign up tells you something about their motivation.

Get More Action & Response

You’ll have some people on your list who open emails and some who don’t open them often or at all. You want to immediately move your active openers to their own list because they’re the ones who are going to be most likely to answer your calls to action. You can stop wasting time sending limited time offers to the inactive list, and send directly to the active list. Then if you have spots left, send a very limited offer with a compelling subject line to the inactive list to help stimulate activity.

Help Manage Where People Are Coming From

When you create more than one list you can manage where they are coming from. For example, let’s say you have a speaking engagement with a very specialized audience. Well, you don’t want them to be on your general list, instead you want them on a list of other people who came to and participated in that event. In this way you can speak directly to them about the event and how great it was, and what they learned. This will build relationships that are very close and responsive because they’ll feel like you get them and even know them now.

Understand Why They Signed Up

For example, if you just let everyone who signs up go to a general list, you’re missing a very important and powerful feature of your software. Let’s say your audience was pushed or pulled to your website via social media, or an article you wrote. But then they look around the site more and something catches their eye such as a particular blog post that has a newsletter sign up under it. Put that person on a list that is only for people who have responded to that particular topic that you blogged about.

As you see, building these different lists give you so much power over how you communicate with them. You know where they came from, what triggered them to sign up, and based on their behavior you know a little more about them than you would if you just had one general list. Of course, you’re going to further segment them into other lists as they buy something new or do something different, but this is the very best way for you to take your email relationship marketing to the next level.

Next Steps

Now that you understand that email marketing offers you a very real way to build relationships with your audience, and that relationship marketing can be done via email in a very effective way, you need to know what to do next.

Start Where You Are

If you’re new to email marketing, then you’re starting with a fresh and blank slate. This is great. You have so many opportunities ahead. First, choose autoresponder software like Aweber or MailChimp that you like. Try out each one before choosing. No one is the right answer for everyone, sometimes you have to try something to figure out if its’ right for you.

If you already have a list, and have identified some ways you can improve your results, and then get started right now. That might mean finding new ways to segment your current list, or finding new ways to build your lists or create new lists. It might mean developing marketing messages that resonate with your audience by creating audience personas. Whatever it means, get started now because nothing beats effective relationship marketing with email in terms of return on investment and simply fabulous results.