9 Signs That You Are Not Targeting Customers Properly in Your Email Campaigns

Email marketing can yield extraordinary results for your marketing campaigns and efforts. Nowadays, more so than ever, customers expect your business to cater to their individual needs. We live in the age of information and the demand for unique and custom experiences grows leaps and bounds by the day.

This is why targeted email marketing is very important to the success of your marketing campaigns. Targeting the right customers is an email marketing tactic that is hard but very profitable to master.

In this article, we will be going over some of the fundamental data you might be not analyzing to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns when creating your campaign segments.

Signs that you are not targeting your customers

Here are some signs that you are not targeting your customers properly in your email campaigns:

1. You’re not targeting by location.

Our planet is a very unique place, so many cultures and peoples inhabit the Earth that you can’t expect that your customers will have a homogenous culture around the globe when it comes to taking in your email marketing campaigns.

This is one of the most obvious and easiest segments to do, luckily for marketers the unique traits, rules, and preferences of all cultures around the world are very well documented and you should make yourself more knowledgeable about these uniquenesses to successfully implement them in your email marketing campaigns.

Depending on the audience you’re trying to reach, all types of changes are required, for example, some cultures prefer different colors to others, this would be a small but effective and inexpensive change to your campaign.

You don’t exclusively need to focus on cultural differences, something as simple as weather conditions also play a big factor in targeting by location, for example, you wouldn’t be very successful selling snow boots in Hawaii.

Always consider the unique needs, requirements, and preferences of your customers based on their location and this will certainly improve your campaign’s success metrics.

2. You may not be looking at your customers’ unique interests

Even though humans as a species have worldwide similarities when it comes to our most basic and fundamental needs, each unique person is an individual with specific characteristics. Whenever possible try to provide the most custom experience you can based on the data you have available regarding your customers.

Naturally, making individual profiles for all of your customers might be a herculean task, but it is important to note that it is possible to group customers based on some characteristics such as profile preferences, education level, age, and gender.

Profiling your customers in this way is a great way to also accompany them as they themselves have changing habits and preferences, the longer you can accompany them the better you can serve them and their unique needs, raising the lifetime value of these customers.

3. You’re not paying attention to your customers’ behavior

It is important to focus on how your customers act and behave when interacting with your products and services. What these behaviors are will vary depending on what your business is about, but generally speaking, trends and patterns will form, it is important to identify under which behavioral patterns your customers fall under.

There are many different things you can consider about behavior, from what devices your users prefer to use when interacting with your business to what support channels are used more often, and even online activity can be analyzed for additional benefit.

Taking the time to analyze your customers’ behavioral patterns can bring many benefits, not only to your email marketing campaigns but also to your product development.

4. You’re not thinking as one of your customers would

This is a very common and often ignored mistake businesses make, albeit very understandable because at some point you become so accustomed to your product or platform that you have a difficult time approaching it with the same perspective as someone seeing or interacting with it for the very first time or at timely intervals.

Taking the time to put yourself in your customers’ shoes is very important, not only because it will provide you with invaluable insight into their needs, expectations, and wants but also help develop a new degree of empathy for your customers, one which will inevitably affect your development as a business with a more customer-centric approach.

Naturally, being more in tune with your customers’ perspectives and expectations will make your email marketing campaigns much better targeted and more successful.

5. You’re ignoring your inactive customers

An inactive customer means that someone was once interested in your platform or product and has not engaged with it, nor cared to, for a certain period of time. It is often easiest to consider these customers as ex-customers or inactive users, when in fact these inactive customers’ existence presents a re-engagement opportunity for you.

Sending a personalized email or message, checking in on your now inactive but nonetheless valued customers can go a long way in improving your engagement rates with renewed interest.

6. You are not using concrete data in your decision-making process

There is a lot of valuable data and information in your previous campaigns you can use to your advantage when it comes to targeting your customers properly. It is important to look at metrics from your previous marketing campaigns to determine what elements of your strategy performed well within any given group of people.

7. You’re not targeting by lifecycle placement

All customers have a lifecycle, which means that depending on their current placement their needs and sensitivities will differ from other customers currently at different stages.

Targeting your customers by their lifecycle placement not only makes the content on offer in your campaign more relevant to the segment you’re engaging with but also shows that you have a keen sense and understanding of your customers and how you place with them.

8. You have low open rates

Another sign that you might not be targeting your customers properly is if you have low open rates on your campaigns, this means that your subject line is not doing a good enough job of captivating your customers’ interest and so they fail to take action to actually open your email and take a look at the content you worked so hard to produce.

In other words, make sure that your subject line is on point and relevant to your target audience for your campaigns in order to amplify your marketing metrics and results.

9. You have a high unsubscribe rate

Some customers will inevitably unsubscribe from your email campaigns, no matter what you do or how well you segment your lists. It is important, however, to keep these unsubscription rates as low as possible.

A high unsubscribe rate means that your campaigns are not only ineffective at causing your customers to engage with your content they’re also detrimental to your marketing efforts and pushing customers away from your business.

Always make sure to pay close attention to your unsubscribe rate and whenever you detect spikes take a few steps back to evaluate how you handled things in order to improve in the future.

Benefits of targeted email marketing

Properly segmenting your customers and defining clearly which customers to target in your next campaign using all of the data discussed above will seriously improve your marketing campaign’s odds of success.

Some of the benefits include

• Better metrics such as
• Higher open rates
• Higher conversion
• Higher click-through rates
• Better customer experience
• Better customer engagement
• Increased ROI (Return on Investment)

Not to mention that, the more accurately you segment your customers the easier it is to do so again in the future, and faster. This translated to an even better performance of the metrics listed above.

Summary

Hopefully, we provided you with some insights into how to target your customers today, below is a brief summary of the listed signs that you’re not targeting your customers properly in your email campaigns:

Make sure you’re:

• Considering customers’ location
• Considering customers’ interests
• Considering customers’ behavior
• Thinking like one of your customers
• Don’t ignore inactive customers
• Use relevant and concrete data in your segmentation decision making
• Consider customers’ lifecycle placement
• Keep an eye on your open rates
• Keep an eye on your unsubscribe rate

That’s all until next time, good luck with your email campaigns!