Increase Your Email Invitation Open Rates With Strategic Targeting
Email marketing is not dead. Far from it. But, it has gotten harder, and it requires more work than ever on the part of the sender. You have less time to grab attention from recipients who also have less time, and as attention spans have diminished, competition has gone up. So how do you break through and achieve that ever more elusive open? The answer is strategic targeting, and that means personalization.
Divide and Conquer
You’ve heard that phrase before, but in the context of this conversation it means something a little different. Yes, you’re separating a large group into smaller groups, but you’re doing so for different reasons, using different tools. It’s called segmenting your audience. Some effective ways to segment include:
- Regions: Local segmentation can be extremely effective for experiential marketing.
- Demographics: Depending on the event, everything from age and gender to profession and income can be relevant.
- Interests: Grouping targeted audience members by their interests better enables you to tailor content.
Make it Tailor-Made
Tailoring content is the key to the whole enterprise. It’s a simple maxim, but a powerful one: People like what they like. Translated for our purposes here, people are genuinely more likely to open correspondence if they think it’s about something that interests them. So if you want them to open your email, find out what they like and design an appropriate piece accordingly. For example, if your event is sports-themed, don’t just send everyone an event invite about sports. Instead, do the research legwork, figure out which sports your mailing list members are interested in, segment them around those specifics, and then mail each group something that specifically references their specific interest(s).
Dynamite!
Here is another simple truism for you: Interesting content is interesting, and boring content is … you guessed it, boring. So, you want people to open your email? Then assure them it will be interesting. This is why subject lines are so important. So as the sender, you have two jobs: 1) Promise to be interesting, and 2) Be interesting. This is actually a trickier balance than it may seem because if you promise too much, the actual correspondence will seem underwhelming. Promise not enough, and people won’t open the email. This is why metrics are so important. Tracking opens tells you, in a very direct fashion, whether you got the balance right or not. But in the end, nothing is better than dynamic content. Excitement begets excitement, and dynamism begets dynamism.
It’s Personal
“To whom it may concern” is not acceptable. Neither is “Dear Homeowner,” or “Dear Music Lover.” And neither is “Dear Greg,” when you’re trying to reach “George.” This is all obvious, and we know it – these are mistakes. But, they’re mistakes that happen after the open. What about before? Yes, personalization matters then too and probably more so because if they don’t open the email in the first place, they’ll never even see your salutation. Find a way, in your subject line, to indicate that you know who you’re emailing. How do you do it? As discussed at the beginning, the answer is strategic targeting. By sending someone something you know they’ll want to receive, in a form they want to receive it in, you’re telling them you know who they are, and that you have something just for them.
The recipe is actually fairly simple: To ensure that email open rates exceed expectations, create an intuitive email campaign built on strategic targeting principles that favor segmentation and personalization, and deliver dynamic content tailored directly to your recipients. Execution, however, is another matter. Fortunately, there are platforms out there now (Limelight is one of the best) that offer cloud-based integrated event marketing solutions that put this all within easy reach. With just a bit of setup, your marketing can be working on behalf of your event in no time.
SOURCES:
http://www.business2community.com/email-marketing/get-emails-opened-increase-open-rates-increase-sales-0883217#!bMmi6K http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2014/25246/marketing-email-benchmarks-open-rates-by-industry-device-trends http://www.fulcrumtech.net/resources/increase-conversion-rates-email-list-segmentation/ http://www.fulcrumtech.net/resources/effective-email-marketing-subject-lines/ http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-stats-list