Last week’s Marketing Tip of the Week focused specifically on who you should be targeting with your email marketing. This week we are covering when to target and what to say. I’m putting these two stipulations together because they are naturally dependent upon one another. In the immortal words of the young Forest Gump, when and what “goes together like peas and carrots.”
The Marketing Ladder
On the surface, asking when to send emails to your different leads seems like an irrelevant question. Obviously you send them whenever you have something to say, right? Yes, of course. That’s easy. But that’s not actually the “when” I’m talking about. My “when” revolves more around when this customer signed up with you to receive these emails. When did you last see them in your store? When was their last purchase from you? That’s why “when” and “what” are so inextricably intertwined.
What you say largely depends on the customer you are targeting and what level, or “when”, they occupy on your
marketing ladder. If you just read that sentence and thought to yourself, “Levels? What are these levels of which you speak? I have no levels. My email marketing ladder only has one rung!” then you may want to rethink your strategy. You see, sending the same email to all your customers, regardless of the business you do, or do not, receive from them, is letting potential dollars slip through the cracks!And this is true whether you are a B2B or B2C. Both strategies should focus on targeted marketing. At the very least, your marketing ladder should have two rungs: those new to your business and existing, repeat customers. It would be better to break things down further, but we’ll work with this basic setup for the purposes of this article. You can easily extrapolate from this how to handle a more complex strategy.
Marketing to Newbies
These people are either potential customers or customers that you’ve only seen once or twice. They may not be new to the industry, but they are new to your location. The primary goal of your email marketing campaign for this market will be drawing these people to your store. They signed up to receive emails from you, so they are obviously interested in what you provide, but they need to be convinced that you are the resource they should be utilizing.
These are the people who need coupons and other incentives to visit your location. They require finessing, enticing and wooing. Compose your emails accordingly.
Marketing to Loyalists
These are the customers that you see regularly. They love you, they love your store, they are going to buy from you at every opportunity. You don’t have to shower these customers with coupons, they are already coming to see you! Not to say you shouldn’t occasionally send one out for them, even existing customers like to feel special, but it’s not your primary marketing strategy with this category of “when”.
For this group, you need to be focusing on industry trends, news and information. Let them know about new items that you are carrying, how they can be useful and why they should buy them! You need to become a resource to these customers. They are already loyal, you just have to keep them that way!
There are a myriad of levels or “when”s you can choose to break your email strategy into depending on how complex a system you want to operate, but the above two options are the absolute minimum you should be entertaining. Leverage your use of when and what to catapult your business to success!
If you have any ideas about email marketing or would like to see an article on a particular subject, just leave something in the comments section below!
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