Email marketing — it may seem like an old-school method of marketing by now, but let me tell you, it sure isn’t dead! According to Statista, there were over 4.25 billion people in 2022 who used email. Also, 92% of the digital population in the United States said they use email as a form of communication. If you’re able to create relevant, targeted content for your audience, email marketing will work for you.
So, how do you write a relevant and targeted email for your audience? Let’s go through the key steps to creating a successful email that your target audience will love.
What is Targeted Content Creation
Targeted content is content created for a specific audience to drive a desired response. And the first step to getting there is creating personalized and specific content for your readers. Doing this will help you resonate with the target audience.
Why is this useful? Targeted content helps establish a relationship with your audience by offering content they want to read, watch, or engage with.
On top of that, it helps you build trust with your customer base, which allows you to better create customer loyalty and word of mouth engagement about your brand.
You want to be seen as a company who “gets” their customers and to be the first brand that comes to mind when your customers have a problem. Overall, being known as the company who solves their customers' problems is the end goal here. This in turn will create higher advertising effectiveness, and who doesn’t want that?
Knowing Your Audience
First and foremost, you must know your audience and what they want/need before you choose a topic to create targeted content about. You could write the most useful content ever, but if it goes to the wrong audience, it will end up virtually useless.
If you’ve already identified your buyer personas, this should be a lot easier, but if you haven’t, don’t worry. Here are a few things to help get you started.
First, you’ll want to use quantitative and qualitative data to help determine who to target. With quantitative data, you will be able to determine demographics such as age, gender, education, income, and more. However, qualitative data is more human-centered and personal than the quantitative data you have gathered. Being able to humanize your audience with qualitative data can help more accurately predict consumer behavior.
After determining that data, you’ll be able to better understand their needs, problems, interests, and preferences. To further help define your target audience, we have broken down the process into the following steps:
- Analyze your company’s products and services
- Gather data on your current customers
- Check your analytics to see buyer behaviors
- Take a look at your competitors and study their customers
- Turn the data you gathered into buyer personas
For more information, check out our blog to get started!
The 3 Benefits of Targeted Email Marketing for Your Audience
Before we go into how to create targeted content, let’s review the benefits behind it.
1. Relevance
Your audience will feel like the content was written just for them, at least that is the hope! Targeted email marketing allows you to send highly relevant content to specific segments of your audience (we’ll get into that more in the section below). By understanding their preferences, behaviors, and demographics of your audience you’ll increase the likelihood of your emails being opened, read, and acted upon.
2. Education
Targeted email marketing can be a powerful educational tool for your audience. It enables you to provide valuable information to your audience which will help them make informed decisions and possibly solve their pain points. Creating informative content like how-to-guides, tutorials, or industry insights to the appropriate audience can position your brand as an authority in your industry.
3. Enhanced User Experience
When you segment your audience and personalize the design and tone of your message to match the preferences of each audience this will help you enhance your user’s brand experience. When your audience receives content that resonates with them, they are more likely to view your brand in a positive light.
How to Create Targeted Content
Now that you know how to define your target audience and the benefits behind target content, you’re probably wondering, how do I create targeted content? Here are some steps:
- Segment Your Email List
- Divide your current and prospective customers into separate lists
- Common segmentation categories include location, interests, engagement level, or purchase behavior or intent
- Set Clear Objectives
- Objectives could include specific goals for each campaign or segment
- Determine whether you’re trying to drive sales, increase website traffic, promote a new product, or nurture leads
- Personalize Your Emails
- This is where knowing your audience comes into play
- You want your audience to feel like you personally wrote them an email and it wasn’t meant for anyone else
- Craft a creative and personalized subject line for the email, you could even include their first name in the subject line
- Include a friendly greeting and their name and make sure the content is fit for their consumption based on the list segmentations you created in the first step
- Write Engaging Content
- Engaging content can be a broad term, but you want to create content that is valuable, informative, and relevant to each segment
- Educate them, don’t sell to them
- Use a conversational tone and address the pain points and provide solutions to their problems
- Try to keep emails short and sweet
- Make sure to include a clear call to action to prompt action
- Examples of common call to actions:
- Click here
- Book now
- Request a quote
- Examples of common call to actions:
- Monitor and Analyze
- Use metrics like open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates to analyze the performance of your emails
- Analyze the data to gain insights into what is working well and where improvements can be made
- Continuously refine your strategies based on these insights
Ready to Start Creating Relevant, Targeted Content in Your Email Marketing Campaigns?
Creating relevant and targeted content for your audience is a great way to propel your business forward and establish a strong connection with your audience.
By personalizing your content, you prove an understanding of your audience's needs. And by crafting engaging content you can build trust, foster customer loyalty, and position your brand as the go-to solution for their pain points.
Overall, your end goal is to be the go-to resource for your customers — and in order to do that, you need to send them target email content that they actually want.
