Email marketing can be a surefire and cost-effective channel to build steady connections with your potential clients and drive revenue growth, however, generic emails will fail to leave any mark on your recipients. If you want to harness the power of email marketing then, it’s time to create relevant email campaigns beyond the “first name” email personalization practices!
After all, would you share your email address only to receive uninteresting and impersonal email messages from a brand? So, what it takes to get your emails to start talking and deliver a personalized experience to each subscriber?
Today, most organizations invest in data collection and technologies that take email personalization beyond the first-name basis. Instead, they use these resources to customize their email content to certain customer behaviors to create opportunities and stronger customer relations.
So, what about behavioral email marketing that makes it effective? Let’s show you!
What Is Behavioral Email Marketing?
Simply put, it means customizing your email messages based on your customers’ behavior and responses. The process of behavioral email personalization involves segmenting an entire email list into smaller and specific groups and then, developing targeted emails that will accurately resonate with the customer data specifically their behaviors, preferences, needs, and other parameters.
If you have a group of subscribers who might open your emails but seldom click the call-to-action button, or click to visit your website, then you need to tailor your email messages to their activities on social channels, other marketing channels, or their search queries. Similarly, if a group of recipients usually click through the email link to visit your website but leave without making any purchase, then you need to craft emails that will incentivize them with exclusive offers to persuade them to buy.
This is where behavioral email marketing strategies are required. So, how effective or beneficial they can be in improving your email marketing campaigns? Here is how to find out.
How can behavioral email marketing boost your overall marketing strategy?
It can clearly define your customers’ needs
By analyzing the behavior of your subscribers, you can know different types of customers with their different needs – even specific to different stages of the buying journey. Behavior-based customization makes emails tailored to their unique needs and more relevant to their previous activities, thereby, making your emails sound a perfect fit to their needs.
It can drive better results
When the emails are optimized to subscribers’ behavior, your emails can guide them through their previous interactions with your business and motivate them to open your emails. When your emails get a good open rate, website traffic, and steady social media engagement, your emails create more opportunities, and the odds of revenue generation increase.
Improved marketing strategies
The behavioral actions of your subscribers will reveal a lot about the positive and negative aspects of your brand along with useful insights about your subscribers. By identifying those negative points, you can determine the scope of improving your marketing strategies and customize them to your audience’s behavior.
Greater relevance leads to more success
The success of an email campaign largely depends on the relevance of the message delivered by behavioral emails. Therefore, these emails may greatly increase the success rate of your campaigns. Along with that, the relevance of your marketing campaign also makes your subscribers trust your brand as they continue engaging more with your emails which lead to more sales!
Boosts customer loyalty
Behavioral emails can work a great deal in winning your subscribers’ trust. Therefore, they will start engaging with your brand more and the email campaign performance also gets better eventually. As your prospects and customers start trusting in your brand’s offerings, they will choose your brand more, over your competitors even when they provide a lower price.
What are the Best Use Cases of Behavioral Email Marketing?
This checklist will guide you on when you can make the best use of behavioral email marketing:
Abandoned Cart Email Marketing
When your prospects abandon their shopping cart instead of completing the purchase, you can create a targeted email that may remind them of the items that are remaining in the cart along with an exclusive and limited offer to compel them to complete their purchase.
Website Abandonment Emails
Like cart abandoned emails, website abandonment emails can retarget your prospects and customers who have left your website without taking any intended action. Create a personalized email message recommending products and special offers to get them back to the website and most likely to complete the purchase.
Post-purchase Follow-ups
After your customers have made any purchase from your website or store, you can craft a thank-you email that may also ask for their feedback on the solution and overall experience. These emails create remarkable upselling opportunities for related products and services which may interest them.
The Password Reset Email
These types of emails are triggered by the user management software that informs users to reset or set a new password for their account. You can use these emails to create a complete guided tour and help them use the tool smoothly. These types of emails also ask users to share information that can be used to create behavioral targeting emails.
Webinar Behavior
Your webinar metrics can help you measure and monitor your webinar attendees and where they stand in the funnel. You can use metrics such as duration of webinar attendance, poll answers, questions asked during the webinar, and post-event activities like content download to create behavioral email marketing campaigns. Therefore, you can decide the kind of insights you can use to create upcoming behavioral email campaigns.
Geolocation Segmentation
One of the best ways to use behavioral data is using insights for location-based lead segmentation. You can personalize your behavioral email techniques by including insights related to the location shared by your prospects and customers.
These location data might include the information shared during event sign-ups on the event page or your website. Therefore, even when the prospect is not currently located at the place where the event is being held, you can create emails based on the location information shared by them when any other or future event is lined up in their city,
Strategies
Here are some effective strategies for implementing behavioral email marketing at your business.
Start Tracking How Prospects Engage with Your Business Online
A major step of executing behavioral email marketing effectively is to track and listen to how they use your website, your emails, social media channels, webinars, surveys, and on other online mediums. You can use different marketing channels to attract, listen to, engage, and then, send behavioral emails that may convert them into customers.
Each channel provides opportunities to listen to them, learn more about your prospects, and devise a thorough data-driven behavioral email campaign based on the collected data.
Collect Behavioral Data
There are different methods to collect behavioral customer data that can enable you to optimize your email campaigns based on their specific behavior and needs. First, you can use surveys and poll answers to gather data from them directly, either via online or in-person survey forms wherein they will be asked to share their preferences.
Another method to collect data is through feedback forms or customer service forms ask them to share their valuable feedback that can tell you about their expectations from your products and emails. You can also create social media polls to gather insights from them and learn more about their usage pattern or needs.
Segmenting the Audience Based on Behaviors
Segmenting the email database is important for behavioral email marketing campaigns. After you segment or categorize the email list, you can create and automate different behavioral emails based on the different patterns of behavior.
For example, you can create a welcome email for new subscribers when they complete registration forms where you can walk them through the business and create a customer onboarding experience. You can create re-engagement emails to attract subscribers or existing customers’ attention who have stopped interacting with your emails while subtly pursuing them to make new purchases by telling them about new product ranges. You can send them educational emails containing helpful information that can solve their problems or meet their requirements.
Identifying the Goals or Intended Actions Users Need to Take
Behavioral emails can be highly effective as they are customized to prospects’ behavior. Therefore, your customers might expect these emails and they are most likely to take action when you identify it accurately based on their behavioral data.
Hence, marketers need to define the exact action which can be the next step to their previous behavioral pattern. For example,
You can create behavioral emails to ask users to submit a form and download any lead magnet such as an ebook, guide, or infographic. Then, send them the transactional email which will confirm the successful download of the content. You can plan the next content based on the present content download such as sending more whitepapers or video links related to a case study they have previously downloaded. This is how you can get your prospects to move through the sales funnel based on these behavioral data and emails carefully planned and collected!
Start Making Conversation Based on the Behavioral Data
When you have started collecting valuable behavioral data and can identify important insights about their interests and needs, you can start creating engaging emails to engage more deeply and achieve a deeper product focus from your prospects, based on consistently collected user behavioral data.
Conclusion
Though many marketers consider behavioral marketing highly effective, they might not be able to utilize it or fully utilize the benefits of behavioral email personalization. If you too are struggling or simply seeking assistance to get started with behavioral email marketing, then let Sootra Consulting guide you. All you need is to ask or send us your business information or email requirements at support@sootraconsulting.com. So, let’s start talking!
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