There’s no denying that delivering a personalized marketing experience is essential in today’s business environment. When it comes to your email marketing efforts, statistics show that companies that ensure their messages are targeted see 18% more revenue than those that don’t (1). And who doesn’t want that?
While most marketers are aware of the benefits that come from delivering a unique and tailored customer experience, they’re often lacking the resources to make this a reality. They’re also often dealing with various customer personas, so adjusting their efforts accordingly is easier said than done. This becomes even more difficult when you consider that most of us have to manually manage the tasks required to provide a personalized marketing experience.
Thankfully, in today’s marketing world, there exists a tool or method for almost every marketing challenge. In the case of personalization, audience segmentation and marketing automation are every marketer’s best friend.
Marketing automation enables you to design, launch, and track your marketing efforts. When you add segmentation to the mix, you improve your ability to personalize your marketing and drive engagement and conversions. In this blog post, we will walk you through some of the ways you can leverage both to amp up your email marketing efforts and maximize results.
Improve Your Ability to Appeal to Your Audience’s Specific Pain Points
Unless you’re a one-trick pony, chances are that your product or service is designed to solve for a variety of customer pain points. How each of these rank in the eyes of your consumer, however, will vary based on their priorities, business goals, industry, and everyday activities.
The power of segmentation is that it allows you to get very targeted and specific with your email content. One way that you can leverage segmentation to make your marketing even more personal is by segmenting customers based on their industry and tailoring your email messages and campaigns to speak that language. This segmentation tactic allows you to show leads and customers that you know exactly what pains them and that you have what it takes to help them thrive and exceed their business goals.
Segmenting your audience based on interest and pain points enhances your marketing because it allows you to tailor your messages to highlight the business differentiators that matter most to your customer. This degree of personalization will make your emails stand out in the eyes of your recipients, encourage them to engage with your brand, and help you differentiate yourself from your competitors at every stage of the customer journey.
Deliver Content Relevant to Your Specific Stage in the Buyer Journey
Content marketing is so powerful that it can contribute 3x as much ROI as traditional outbound marketing at only a fraction of the cost (2). While content marketing can yield amazing results on its own, combining it with segmentation and email empowers you to play on a completely different level than your competitors.
The reason segmentation is so important when it comes to email content distribution is the latter can only help you get results if it appeals and provides value to your customers in the first place. It needs to highlight their interests but also be appropriate to their stage in the customer journey. Providing bottom-of-funnel content to top-of-funnel leads will likely overwhelm them and make them turn away. Similarly, providing top-of-funnel content to customers in the decision-making stage probably won’t help them get any closer to signing on the dotted line.
Sending customers specific content based on their needs, interests, and stage in the sales cycle improves the personalization of your marketing efforts and helps you more effectively guide customers from one phase in the customer journey to the next.
Improve Inbox Placement and Ensure Your Messages Get Read
Deliverability is a hot topic in the marketing world and should be a high priority for any marketer who wants to see a high ROI from their email marketing efforts. While engagement isn’t the only determinant of inbox placement, it does play a significant role in determining your overall email deliverability. Segmenting your audience and providing them with tailored communications can help you keep engagement rates high, spam complaints low, and drive your conversion rates through the roof.
You can read more on how segmenting your audience for engagement can help you improve inbox placement in our eBook, Deliverability 101: Our Guide to Engagement Segmentation for Improved Deliverability.
Segmentation and Marketing Automation Allow You to Attract and Engage the Best Leads
Segmenting your audience based on factors such as interests, industry, and geographic location, among others, can help you deliver a more personalized experience to your audience and engage with them on a deeper, more meaningful level. More importantly, taking this step to personalize your marketing allows you to target the best opportunities so your team can focus their efforts where they matter most.
While having to divide and group your contacts based on these characteristics and then deliver targeted messages seems like a tedious task, the right marketing automation platform can make this process seamless and effortless. Act-On equips you with the tools to segment your audience, launch campaigns, and drive the marketing and sales alignment you need to manage the customer journey from beginning to end — all in one simple platform.