Targeted email marketing is as important as knowing who your target audience is when writing a blog post. If you’re not putting in the extra effort to target your emails to the right subscribers, your ROI won’t be as high as it could be. Simply knowing who your target audience is when writing an email isn’t enough in email marketing. You need to segment your lists and send the emails at the right time.
Manually segmenting your lists is time-consuming and sometimes confusing or frustrating, and not something that many would opt for. Fortunately, there are many applications that will segment and assist with other critical components of targeted email marketing. Below we will define what targeted email marketing is and list the top six tools you can use to improve your email marketing.
What Is Targeted Email Marketing?
Targeted email marketing is the exact optimization of email marketing to maximize ROI (return on investment). It involves sending emails targeted to a certain demographic or psychographic. By speaking their language, you are more likely to earn their sale. Another aspect of targeted email marketing is sending the right emails to customers during the correct stage of the buying cycle. This further increases an email’s relevance to the subscriber. Sending relevant emails to subscribers improves retention and open rates because they’re actually interested in reading your emails. If it’s not relevant to them at any point in time, they won’t feel motivated to read the email.
Using an example from Pure360, “Say you sent an email to someone at the ‘interest’ stage that invited them to visit your website for a quote. This could look like a hard sales tactic and really put them off your brand. Instead, you could provide them with some basic information on your company and subtle reassurance that your future emails will feed their research.”
6 Targeted Email Marketing Tools to Use
1. Hemingway Editor
Clarity is an important element in copywriting. If your email content isn’t clear or direct, then your conversion rates will be low. After writing each email for your subscribers, check it in the Hemingway Editor before sending. The app points out sentences that are too long or too complex, this is one of the many services that you can utilize. It also highlights weak phrases, passive voice, and words that have simpler alternatives. Correcting these errors improves the clarity and quality of your email copy. Hemingway Editor is free to use.
2. PutsMail
This email marketing tool shows you what your email would look like in the inboxes of recipients. It’s important to preview your emails before sending them to ensure nothing is off with the HTML or formatting. If the headline has code in it or the email doesn’t load correctly, fewer people will open and read your emails.
When you test the emails through PutsMail, only use email addresses of your own for testing purposes. If you enter random email addresses or those of your subscribers, they’ll receive the test email. The tool permits up to 10 email addresses, more than enough to test it on the most-used email platforms. It’s also free to use.
3. A/B Split and Multivariate Test Duration Calculator
Do you struggle with deciding how long to run an A/B test? The A/B Split and Multivariate Test Duration Calculator solves this problem by calculating how long you should execute the test. You only have to enter five pieces of information into the tool:
- Estimated existing conversion rate.
- Minimum improvement in conversion rate you want to see.
- Number of variations/combinations.
- Average number of daily visitors.
- Percentage of visitors you want to include in the test.
4. IsValid
Is the conversion rate increase from your split test high enough to justify a permanent change? This is a huge issue that many entrepreneurs and new marketers struggle with in targeted email marketing. But there’s a tool for that too! IsValid calculates whether or not your results are statistically significant. The tool is simple and quick to use. All it asks for is the number of samples and the number of conversions before and after the experiment.
5. Campaigner
This targeted email marketing application provides a wide range of tools that help drive sales and strengthen customer relationships. Campaigner offers targeted email autoresponders and workflows, advanced list management, segmentation tools, and a professional email campaign creator. The app’s segmentation feature offers categorization of your list based on factors like purchase history, business size, age, gender, job title, geography, and industry.
Campaigner enables a feature that gives subscribers the opportunity to only unsubscribe from content that isn’t relevant to them. This decreases your overall unsubscribe rate and improves your targeting without you having to lift a finger. Campaigner costs $19.95-$549.95 per month depending on how many contacts you have. The $19.95 per month plan is for those with less than 1,000 contacts.
6. FreshMail
FreshMail has an intuitive template editor that you can use for creating emails with a professional product demo type appearance. Award-winning artists designed FreshMail’s templates, so you know they’re of high quality. Checking for more than good aesthetics, FreshMail tested each new template for effectiveness before releasing it. You can spend less time on designing and more time on writing and sending emails when you use their templates.
This targeted email marketing app also offers the ability to create e-learning courses for subscribers, establish lead nurturing programs, and automate communications with subscribers. It’s free to use FreshMail as long as you send less than 2,000 emails to 500 or fewer subscribers per month. If you exceed what the free version supplies, you can choose to upgrade to an unlimited or pay-as-you-go plan.
Summing It Up
Targeted email marketing is essential for successful email marketing. It’s not as simple as sending emails when inspiration strikes. You must track stats, split test, and improve your copywriting skills. Targeting the right audience at the right time is also crucial. The six tools listed above can be used to improve your targeted email marketing in numerous ways that matter.
Do you have any experience using one of the targeted email marketing tools we discussed? Remember, with targeted email marketing you’ll be sending out bulk emails, so factor that in as well. Know of some great tools that we missed? Let us know in the comments below.