Selecting an Email Marketing Audience

February 5, 2020

We’ve stressed the impact and importance of incorporating email marketing into your advertising strategy. We’ve told you the why and the how. Today we’ll identify the who. Defining your audience is one of the most important aspects of email marketing because it specifies exactly who you want the content to reach. Getting specific with your target audience allows each of your subscribers to develop a personal relationship with your brand. Think it sounds like a bit too much to handle? Rearview Advertising can show you the way to a perfectly targeted, intelligently segmented email list.

Right on Target

Have you ever complained about too many irrelevant emails flooding your inbox? Maybe you’ve signed up for a discount, only to find you’ve received 5 additional emails from that brand, and then proceeded to unsubscribe all together? We’ve all been there. Finding your target audience helps define which types of emails are going to whom. Sending your subscribers content they’ll actually want to open and read is easy when you target an audience. A target audience is the group of people at which your campaign is aimed. Each marketing effort presents a question about its own target demographic: who would be most likely to convert? For example, if you are a makeup artist trying to promote your business, your target audience might be women from ages 18 – 55. A group in that audience may be even more likely to engage with your business. Narrow it down to the demographic that will most likely buy your goods or services.

Segmentation is Key

If you haven’t seen the results you were hoping for with your email campaigns, segmentation might be the answer to your problems. Instead of sending an email to your entire list of subscribers, try separating your audience into specific groups. This is known as segmentation, a marketing strategy that identifies subgroups within your target audience in order to tailor your content to the people who will want it the most. There are various ways of segmenting your emails. Subgroups can be based on many things such as gender, income level, geographic location, etc. The list goes on. You can be as specific as you’d like, even forming subgroups based on the past purchasing behaviors and personality traits of your subscribers. The more specific and tailored the email is, the better relationship and loyalty you’ll see from your audience.

Growing Pains

Many believe that the more names you get on a list, the more results you’ll see in your business. While growing your list is an important factor in building an audience, be aware that getting subscribers just for the sake of the numbers will often land you right into the spam folder. A term called vanity metrics refers to the numbers associated with popular marketing mediums like followers, traffic hits, and subscribers. Luring people to subscribe to your emails in order to increase metrics, only to serve them generic emails every time, is a guaranteed way to lose your audience’s trust and loyalty.

Instead of becoming fixated on the numbers, think of ways your audience will help you grow your business. This leads us back to segmentation and making sure you’re sending emails with a purpose. Imagine that you’re talking to a specific client or customer. Find out what makes them most excited about your goods and services. Communicate in a thoughtful way that will have them reading through the email and then motivated to take the leap. These specific and meaningful interactions with your subscribers are what will grow your business, not the number of people on the lists.

Wrapping it Up

When it comes to email marketing success, the audience factor has proven to be one of the trickiest aspects. That being said, targeting your audience by using segmentation and being thoughtful with your content could be the missing puzzle piece. Remember that your entire subscriber list will not be interested in every email you want to send. But thoughtful, demographically targeted email with carefully crafted content can earn the loyalty of your subscribers. 

Need help identifying and targeting your email marketing audience? Contact us to learn more about how you can level up your email marketing with Rearview Advertising. Also, follow us on Facebook for more advice on leveling up your marketing efforts.