What is personalized email marketing? It is the single best way to market your blog while creating your own group of raving fans! Because who doesn’t like the personal touch?
To build a thriving list of “your people” takes a bit of time, so you should start today. You will learn more about your tribe while you do, and that will help you to build your business the right way.
You will need an email service provider (ESP) that works for marketing.
Examples are: MailerLite (FREE), AWeber, ConvertKit, Drip, or Constant Contact. You may have to research what is available where you live and what you can afford.
The ESP will give you a platform to write your newsletters, create opt-in boxes (i.e embedded forms) and create landing/sales pages.
Related Post: How To Use MailerLite
Welcome to Fearless Affiliate. My name is Irma and I help new bloggers to learn the ropes. There is a lot to take in that first year of blogging, from choosing a niche to changing your mindset from worker bee mentality to that of successful entrepreneur.
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*Some of the links in this post may be affiliate links. That means if you click the link and sign up for something, I may receive a future commission. This is of no extra cost to you. My full disclosure is here.*
Why Do I Need An Email Marketing Strategy?
In my previous post, Relationship Marketing With Email, I gave you multiple reasons for using email as well as ways to attract people to your list.
In this post, I will share how to make the emails that you write to your list more personal. We do this because we are sorting our “tribe” out from the lookie-loos or freebie hunters. Those people are not your true fans, or tribe; they just want your free stuff.
Your tribe of fans are your “true” customers.
Your tribe is loyal. They will help you share your content and they will rave about your website and products. You will never find better free advertising than your fans. Big business knows this, and now, so do you.
For that reason, you cannot just throw an opt-in box on your home page and call it done. If you want to strengthen your brand, build your business, and earn an income, you need fans.
But how do you find your fans?
With offers tailored to them. You can do that with personalized email.
Email is the perfect way to build a relationship because you have fast access to the individual.
5 Ways to Personalize Your Email Messages
Personalizing email messages is something that you would do for your friends. If you knew that your friend hated strawberries, you would not serve them for dessert. You would give your friend something that they like.
Likewise, if you are trying to build your list, you will want your subscribers to feel like you get them. You want them to feel welcome in your world.
I know that the people sending me personalized emails do not know me. Still, I like getting emails that use my name. Almost everybody does.
Even if you have 1,000,000 subscribers, you can treat each recipient as an individual.
Simply add personalization to your email newsletter. By using the {NAME} personalization tag, you have added the name that they signed up with. Quality ESP platforms come with the ability to personalize many areas of your marketing materials this way.
I use and recommend MailerLite, which is free for your first 1,000 subscribers. It will help you personalize and segment your subscribers.
There are several ways to personalize email messages.
- The Email Subject Lines – 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. Making a subject line stand out to the recipient will encourage them to open it.
- The Salutation – If you collected this information when a subscriber signed up, you can use it for your emails to them. This depends on your blog’s niche. For the most part you would only ask for the email address and first name of subscribers.
- Your Return Email Address – Thanks to the Can-Spam Act, you are legally required to include your real name and a real email address at the bottom of all online correspondence. This is a good thing because it shows recipients that you are a real person.
- 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. Be sure to add links to 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, is to know who they are. After all, it’s always about them, not you. You can add surveys to emails to learn more about what your tribe wants.
Using all of these factors is important in relationship marketing. Get to know your audience, let them get to know you.
5 Reasons Why Subscriber Segmentation Is Important
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. This is crucial if you blog about different topics. Segmenting means that recipients get the emails of interest to them.
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.
1. There is No Such Thing as One-Size-Fits-All
If you blog about different subjects you don’t want to send topic A emails to the topic B readers. For example, if you blog about parenting and living in an RV. Some of your parenting readers may be interested in your RV posts, but your RV readers may not be interested in parenting tips.
To avoid alienating groups of subscribers, have anyone who signs up for your for parenting advice freebie go into one segment and RV readers into another.
2. In Some Cases Timing Is Everything
Most ESP’s have an option to send based on location. This is helpful if many of your subscribers are in different locations around the world. Or even across the country.
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.
3. You Can Make Each Message Count
When you segment lists appropriately, you can send hyper-targeted message to groups of people who are already interested in that subject.
I have had to unsubscribe from lists that were not segmented. I wanted blogging tips, but got emails about homesteading. #sad
4. You’ll Build Your Reputation & Brand Faster
Marketing is all about the know, like, and trust factor. People buy from brands that they trust. But how do you get people to trust you?
By offering value about a subject that they care about.
This can be easily done using email and segmentation. Get your subscribers onto the right list and then send them helpful information on that topic. 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.
Send your subscribers new freebies before you offer it on your website. Find free items that they may want and link to them. Give lots of value.
5. 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.
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. Quality ESP’s offer different ways to segment, such from different landing pages or different opt-in boxes.
For more information, read segmenting your audience in MailerLite.
8 Ways to Segment Your Email 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. If your parenting audience is in the 20 to 45 age bracket and your RV group is in the 50 to 75 age bracket, they have different needs. They also have different lifestyles.
Same for 20 to 45 year old’s with no children. Or young millennials who live in a motor home.
Initially you may get a large variety of people signing up.
As you refine your blog’s message, people who don’t fit will unsubscribe themselves. This is a good thing. You only want to help, or promote to, people who are interested in what you have to say.
You can check your demographics in Google Analytics.
Related Post: Google Analytics Tutorial
2. Location –Some people will get your latest email at the same time it is sent out. Others may not see that email for hours. If you are sending a limited time offer, you want every chance for it to reach your people in time for them to act on it.
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 – A prospect is someone who is simply in your target audience.
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 special list for exclusive content.
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, which is also different from a customer.
If someone is in the learning mode, they’re not ready for your ‘buy now’ offer.
8. Persona – If you have different topics on your blog, you will create more than one avatar, or buyer persona for each topic. And you will likely have different opt-in offers for each group.
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.
Why You Need More Than One List
You need different landing pages for different offers. Makes sense right? As you build out your email list, you may find that you need to sort your tribe members into different lists.
Look at these reasons to have more than one list as you set up your ESP.
Determine Audience Motivation
Having one general list ignores some important information about your audience, such as:
- What motivates them?
- When will they want to take that next step?
- Why did they sign up for your list?
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 cold 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.
If a lot of people are signing up for a specific freebie, then you should create more content on that topic. That is valuable data.
Conclusion
As you see, personalizing emails, segmenting, and building different lists give you so much power over how you communicate with your tribe.
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.
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. Choose an auto-responder and see if it is right for your needs.
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.
Or it might mean developing marketing messages that resonate with your audience by creating more audience personas.
Whatever it means, get started now because nothing beats effective relationship marketing with email in terms of return on investment.
Click here to get started with MailerLite!
Please share this post with anyone that you think will benefit from it. And please sign up for my FREE weekly newsletter of tips and free stuff for bloggers. You will get the password for my Resource Library of freebie PDF’s, like my Google Analytics cheatsheet or my SEO for beginners checklist. #win-win!
Ok, that is it from me. Now it is your turn – I want to know your thoughts on personalizing your email marketing. Do you segment? What did you struggle with when setting it up? Do you have any email marketing tips to share?
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Have a great week and happy blogging!
-Irma