Establishing one-to-one communications with your customers, explaining how your products or services can meet their needs at the right time, is an achievable goal thanks to email marketing.
This marvel is called relevance.
Will it be so difficult to achieve?
According to the RAE, relevance is the "quality or condition of being relevant", that is, that which has importance, significance, which stands out.
Relevance is the most important factor for successful email marketing campaigns in the long term. If your message lacks value, importance or meaning, your readers will not open it and, worse, they will mark it as spam, so you will have lost all the trust you have built up over time.
Thus, the big goal for marketers is to generate relevant messages, according to the offer, with the right content, and send them at the right time, to the right audience.
It is natural to wonder, then, whether this might not be too ideal a scenario, difficult to achieve in the real world.
The answer is no. Today, more than ever, it can be done. The technology exists for it; it only requires good planning, time and the will to do it.
What we can help you with is to plan the strategy required, in 4 key steps:
1. Build up your contact base with information that adds value
The first requirement for relevance is to have a customer database whose information is also relevant. Start by asking yourself what information about your customers will be really useful to you.
We are referring to data collected over time, not data you get as soon as you win a customer or in a first contact with them.
According to best practices, this information is derived from your customers' behavior during their time with your company, past purchases, geographic and psychographic data, such as their tastes, interests or hobbies.
Example: A regional insurer begins capturing customer interactions with past campaigns and progressive forms, allowing it to enrich its base with behavioral data, such as the type of insurance most consulted, their renewal habits and preferred channel. You can then personalize offers and reduce the email purchase decision cycle by 30%.
2. Segment your customer base and analyze their data.
Once you have enough information, start grouping contacts that show similar interests. It is highly recommended to perform segmentations of more than one variable.
What you should keep in mind is that the more segmented your customer base is, the more relevant communications you can generate, because you will be closer to that desired goal of one-to-one.
We know that reaching perfection in a personal and direct dialogue is impossible, but we also know that every attempt to reach it will optimize your service, so we leave it up to you to decide how much time you are willing to invest in the quest for success that relevance brings.
Example: A private university uses segmentation by educational level, career type and declared interest to send differentiated content: invitations to live lectures for potential engineering students and exclusive discounts for those interested in postgraduate studies. Thanks to this multivariate segmentation, it achieved a 45% increase in the overall engagement of its email campaigns.
3. Develops tests
Once you have the right content for each segment and before sending it out, test it with a small group of customers to gauge their level of acceptance.
Maybe the content is right and all the work was done correctly, but maybe the way of exposing it or the subject matter or the call to action was not clear.
That is why it is highly advisable that, before sending your messages to the whole segment, you always send two test mailings to a reduced group of the base and detect which one has the highest acceptance. The one that proves to be the most successful is the one you should finally send.
Example: An electronics retailer performs A/B tests with two versions of its monthly newsletter. The difference: one version includes CSS micro-animations on the "Buy Now" buttons and the other does not. When analyzing the results, they find that the version with microinteractions generates 28% more clicks on mobile devices, especially among users aged 25-34.
4. Determine the best shipping frequency
A very common question in email marketing is how often to send messages to customers and contacts.
There is no exact answer and no single frequency. Some segments of your customer base will prefer one frequency and others will prefer another, and this is also due to the type of information you wish to communicate, as well as the different treatment to be given to offers, new product information and others.
We are of the opinion that the time to communicate is whenever you have something relevant to communicate. Keeping in mind the definition of relevance, if it is important, significant, then communicate it.
Example: A natural products brand conducts a segment activity analysis and discovers that a loyal group of shoppers eagerly opens weekly emails with wellness tips, while a more casual segment responds better to a monthly digest. By applying this differentiated frequency, it improves the open rate and, in addition, reduces the unsubscribe rate by 18%.
Creating relevant messages is not just a best practice; it's a necessity in an environment where users receive dozens of messages every day. Use these four steps as a strategic foundation for designing useful, personalized and timely communications.
And if you're looking for a platform with the robustness, flexibility and experience needed to perform these practices with precision, MasterBase® is your best choice.
With more than 20 years leading the email marketing market in multiple countries, it is the ideal tool to create, automate and optimize your campaigns with a strategic approach.
