Businesses are always seeking new and exciting ways to engage with their customers. Today, marketers and sales agents can choose from a range of technologies to connect with them.
Recent years have seen the rise of live chat and chatbot features on websites and social media channels, but email remains the foremost choice for customer-company engagement.
67% of buyers prefer email communication with B2B organizations. Even as technology develops and alternative communication channels become available, email remains a highly effective marketing channel.
Before seeking out the best email marketing trends, take some time to lay the foundations for your email campaigns – for example, by creating buyer personas that will maximize your email marketing strategy.
Conversational marketing figures for 2019-2020
It’s beneficial to collect data on prospective and current customers. A company can use data to creatively draw the attention of customers in a given target audience. Buyer personas provide a platform for marketers to develop personalized marketing campaigns that are laser-focused. These personas enable you to maximize the efforts you make in your email marketing strategy.
In this post, we present a guide to creating buyer personas for email marketing.
What Are Buyer Personas?
A buyer personais a characterization of a brand’s typical customer. Buyer personas resemble your customers at different stages of your sales funnel. These personas enable marketers to communicate with customers effectively and create targeted content for specific audiences.
Marketing and sales teams typically use CRM tools and buyer personas to interpret where a customer stands in the sales funnel. Buyer personas are valuable because they allow companies to segment their customers into different categories.
These personas enable companies to communicate with customers through personalized emails that are more relatable. Below are some steps you can use when creating buyer personas for email marketing.
1. Conduct Thorough Market Research
Market research is precious to a business. Research offers vital information that can improve a company’s marketing campaigns and, ultimately, increase sales or sales engagement.
To create successful buyer personas, your marketing department needs to gather as much data as possible on your business and products. The data collected will offer a picture of your business landscape.
There are many ways to conduct market research. Companies can research online to get an outlook on their industry. They can also engage directly with potential customers through different tactics. Sales agents can try calling with an appointment setting script and a cold calling software to schedule interviews. In the field, researchers can use surveys, questionnaires, and customer observation.
Market research provides actionable information. Created by ijeab/Freepik.com
A company should know the impact it has on a target market. It must understand how it compares to competitors within the same niche. It’s vital to see how a company is performing on product cost and service delivery. It should know the factors that lead customers to buy from it. With this information, it can create buyer personas that take these factors into account.
2. Understand Your Customers
To ensure customers have positive experiences with your email marketing campaigns, you must understand them. Who are the customers buying your products? Why are they buying from you?
With some research, you can uncover the reasons a customer chooses to do business with your brand. To unearth helpful customer insights, find data on customer demographics, behavior, and economic status.
There are many ways to learn about your customers. Companies can use analytics tools to discover information on online user behavior and customer demographics. With secure chat programs, customer service teams can survey current customers directly. Surveys and questionnaires open channels for customers to explain their reasoning with in-depth answers.
A tech company may offer an excellent electronic data interchange (EDI) solution for B2B document exchange and transaction management. What drives customers to choose their solution over others? Companies must understand their customers’ wants, needs, and motivations when making successful buyer personas. With the customer data available, it’s easier to create personas for better targeting and improve customer satisfaction metrics.
3. Use Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is an excellent source of data. With feedback channels, a company can directly open communications with its customers. Positive or negative reviews and comments on products can lead a business to improve the quality of products on offer. Compare reviews for similar products between your company and competitors in the market. You can find ideas to build favor with customers.
Customer feedback offers insight into the motivation of your customers. Customers can tell your company the precise reasons for choosing whether to trust your product or service over others.
You can use reviews to understand why a customer has a digital shopping cart abandoned and opted for your company over competitors and vice versa. Use this information to create relevant buyer personas for targeted email marketing.
4. Build Buyer Personas
After collecting the data on your products and customers, compile it to create various buyer personas. When engaging with businesses, customers expect companies to deliver the content they want. That’s why building a robust buyer persona is a must in small business management to avoid sending irrelevant emails to current and prospective customers.
A sample buyer persona. Infographic vector created by Freepik.
A buyer persona will include details about a particular type of customer. It will show the customer’s demographic, economic status, content interests, purchasing motivations, and more.
This information enables the marketing team to create highly targeted email content that will appear personalized to the customer. These emails will give the customer exactly what they want at the right time.
5. Develop Email Marketing Strategies for Each Persona
After conducting the research and unearthing various buyer personas in your email list, develop an email marketing strategy for each persona. When coupled with buyer personas, email campaigns can drive sales for your company. In creating an email marketing strategy, marketing teams should outline steps to take when engaging with customers.
Your email marketing strategies should focus on the appropriate target audiences. Up to 70% of millennials are frustrated with brands that send irrelevant emails. Focus on the right goals to avoid landing in the spam folder.
Segment your email subscriber list into different persona types. Social entrepreneurship companies may have some customers because of their products and others due to their social activities.
Outline the overall goals of your email marketing strategies. Determine the tactics you want to employ for each buyer persona. Choose ways to evaluate the impact of your email campaigns with email marketing metrics. These are the best way to discern customer engagement with your copy. You will thus know if your email campaign is a hit or a miss.
6. Track Key Metrics
Many different metrics measure the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign. These offer insights into the behaviour of customers upon receiving emails from your company. By monitoring open and click-through rates (CTR), you can see how well an email marketing campaign performs among your customers.
When emails have a high open rate and CTR, the marketing team is creating enticing campaigns. According to MailChimp, the average email open rate across industries is 21.33%, while the average CTR sits around 2.62%. While customers prefer to use email when communicating, it’s challenging to draw their attention to your campaigns.
Use email to grab customer attention. Created by stories/Freepik.
Other email metrics offer further insights into the performance of a campaign. Constantly monitor the email bounce rate to determine how many recipients have technical reasons for leaving emails unopened.
A company can also monitor forward or share rates and conversion rates. These indicate the level of support or loyalty a company has from its customers.
7. Review Buyer Personas and Email Campaigns
No marketing campaign is perfect. With all of the data available, marketers can make educated decisions about their targeted content campaigns. Monitor the performance of your email marketing campaigns and take time to evaluate. Teams can host brainstorming sessions while video conferencing. Set aside some time to get the creative juices flowing and improve your campaigns.
Be sure to evaluate the effectiveness of your buyer personas. People, customer trends, and behavioral patterns can change quickly. By priorizing task such as assessing the buyer persona, companies can tweak and adjust their email marketing campaigns. This assessment is crucial as it can improve a company’s communication with its customers.
Try Making Buyer Personas Yourself
You can and should continually improve email marketing campaigns. To make improvements with tangible results, you’ll need to create buyer personas. Gather all possible information on your current and prospective customers, then put yourself in their shoes. What do you need to communicate that will spur these customers into action?
There is an information overload in today’s digital spaces. So many mediums are vying for your customer’s attention. By knowing who they are and what they want, you can provide the messages they need to great effect. For now, email marketing is here to stay. Get your buyer personas right and your customers clicking.
