Effective Email Strategies for Startups Marketing on a Budget

Effective Email Strategies for Startups Marketing on a Budget

Give them that value, and show them they have a reason to keep your emails rolling into their inbox. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your customers, based on actual customer data and market research. Buyer personas, in other words, let you put yourself in the target customer’s shoes. They help you build your site content for the right target audience, and they also help you custom-craft your marketing emails with your target audience in mind. Once you have your customers properly analyzed and segmented, you can begin crafting targeted email marketing campaigns directly customized for each customer type. Keep in mind that your giveaway strategy shouldn’t include a general gift like an iPhone or iPad; you should offer a gift, like a free bundle, that’s directly related to your product and that would directly appeal to your target customers. Attach a free ebook to some of your emails if you know your target audience would find it helpful. You can also offer a free consultation from your company, or share useful blog posts that would help your target audience answer their questions about the industry. Regardless of which options you choose, you want to make your target customers feel that they’ve gained something after reading each email. By dividing your customers into the most precise segments possible, you can then use that information to construct buyer personas, or the audiences for your different emails.

No Money? No Problem. 30 Low Budget Marketing Ideas for Your Business
4 Ways to Get Big Marketing Results on a Starter Budget
Where Should You Spend Your Marketing Budget? (Even If It’s Not Much)
Effective Email Strategies for Startups Marketing on a Budget

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

We’ve all felt similar skepticism when it comes to email marketing campaigns. We’ve unsubscribed. We’ve marked emails as spam. We’ve had serious regrets for putting our names on a mailing list in the first place.

That’s not because there’s something inherently wrong with marketing emails. Instead, it’s because most companies aren’t doing them right.

This is bad news for those companies, whose perceived spamminess is deterring leads and causing even existing customers to seek out better brands. For companies like small startups — which need to start from scratch to build a strong customer base — it’s particularly important that marketing emails don’t accidentally push target customers away.

The good news, though, is that email campaigns have the potential to be highly customized, making those that are done correctly one of the most effective ways to acquire and retain customers. While users might not care about a message that blatantly promotes your great new product, they will care if the message feels personal and brings them value. Give them that value, and show them they have a reason to keep your emails rolling into their inbox. Here are some strategies for doing just that.

Creating buyer personas.

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your customers, based on actual customer data and market research. The idea is to put a fictional name and face on each of your customer micro-segments so that you can visualize what the typical representative from that segment might be like. This, in turn, helps you think about a target customers’ intent as they look for the products or services that suit them best, as well as their point of view as they open your emails.

Buyer personas, in other words, let you put yourself in the target customer’s shoes. If you were the user, would this email be appealing, or would you unsubscribe? What, as a member of a particular segment, would drive you to consider that email valuable? How would that be different if you were a member of a different segment — say, a 30-year-old woman rather than a 70-year-old man?

Buyer personas are a great way to turn your micro-segments into something a little more tangible. They help you build your site content for the right target audience, and they also help you custom-craft your marketing emails with your target audience in mind. If you’re stuck trying to figure out how to create your persona, enterprise software company Xtensio and inbound marketing agency Hubspot both offer free persona creator tools to ensure that you include all the important characteristics.

Micro-segmentation.

Before you start sending out marketing emails, it’s important to take the time to conduct extensive research and analysis of your target audience. Segmentation is the practice of dividing your target customers into different customer types based on their shared characteristics.

Micro-segmentation is just the more precise version of that. It involves breaking down these segments into smaller, more specific ones. For example, a broader customer segment might be 30-year-old women who live in California. A micro-segment might be 30-year-old women who live in Sacramento and work in marketing. And an even better micro-segment is…

COMMENTS

WORDPRESS: 0
DISQUS: 0