5 Ways to Influence Your Subscribers With Relevant Content

How to influence subscribers with relevant content

Use the following five email marketing best practices to customize content, improve your engagement rate, and boost sales among current subscribers.

1. Invest in emotion-based customer engagement.

Social media outlets set the standard for content immersion, which means investing in emotion-based customer engagement has never been more essential. When subscribers actively engage in promotions and updates companies send, it creates trust and often brings value to both parties.

Think strategically when outlining marketing strategies to emotionally connect with customers. For example, ask yourself the following questions:

• What’s important to each customer? 
• How do you want them to engage with each piece of content you send them? 
• How can you give them the value that makes them want to engage further with your brand?

By analyzing how subscribers engage with various marketing messages, you can personalize their journey through the sales funnel. 

Monitor engagement for your social media marketing efforts by tracking likes, shares and comments. If you want to use social media to build your email list, try to associate your social media followers’ accounts with their names on your email list. 

You should also tack your email clicks. This way, you can see engagement in the aggregate and drill down into individual users to see what content they like and engage with.

2. List segmentation helps you tailor content to your subscribers.

Market segmentation helps simplify and segment multiple email lists and tailor content based on specific conditions and customer personas. 

List segmentation allows marketers to define a target audience by grouping subscribers according to criteria like geography, age, gender or transactional history. This helps companies offer more relevant content to specific email recipients. 

For example, say your company is promoting a cosmetics sale. With list segmentation, you can focus this campaign on women and customers who’ve purchased cosmetics in the past. 

To further drill down, if your cosmetic product has a skin-regenerating quality for aging, you can focus on cosmetic-buying customers over 30. To get even more granular, direct a campaign for a skin-regenerating product with a moisturizer for dry skin to cosmetic-buying subscribers over 30 who live in northern states during the winter.

3. Automation can boost subscriber engagement.

Email marketing can be daunting and time-consuming for many businesses. Email automation provides a cost-effective solution.

Automation is an easy way to nurture and engage current and prospective customers with minimal effort. Today’s customers want instant responses and interactions, which can be where companies fall short. Email marketing platforms help marketers create customer journeys that dynamically send emails based on individual data on people and their interactions with the business across different channels. 

Here are some email marketing automation tips: 

• Use automation to reduce shopping cart abandonment. Email automation help reduce shopping cart abandonment by triggering emails to subscribers with discount offers and reminders about their cart items. 
• Use automation to trigger personalized offers and messages. After building an email marketing list, keep it updated with accurate customer information so you can send VIP content, birthday emails or suggestions based on search results. 
• Gather data to improve automated messages. Use existing data from other business systems, like your CRM or survey tools, to boost overall customer profiles and deliver more personalized emails.

By capitalizing on automation’s opportunities, companies can become more productive, interpret data to revive cold leads, and increase total revenue.

4. Timing is crucial to reaching subscribers with your content.

Engaging with your audience across different channels at the right time is crucial to a marketing campaign’s success or failure. For example, experts advise following up with inbound online leads within 10 minutes. You should also follow up quickly via email after a prospect engages in relevant on-site searches. 

Time of day is also a critical parameter in email campaign engagement rates. Consider geolocation when segmenting your list to ensure you deliver emails when the recipient is most likely to see them. Some email marketing platforms allow you to be more specific and send emails based on individual recipients’ past engagement metrics.

5. Reporting and analytics can inform your subscriber content.

Email marketing software streamlines the process of tracking email analytics and determining how subscribers interact with content and data. Understanding campaign performance helps you develop new strategies and create more centralized audience targeting. 

Email marketing platform analytics and tools like Google Analytics and website analytics help marketers make critical decisions about stagnant promotions. If users aren’t responding to broad promotions the way they did in the past, collecting data can help you figure out why.

The best email marketing services for targeting subscribers

A robust email marketing service can make all the difference when delivering customized content to subscribers. Here are some of the best email marketing services to consider. 

• Constant Contact. Constant Contact is our pick as the best email service for small businesses. It’s affordable, with plans starting at $9.99 monthly and a 60-day free trial. It allows you to create segmented lists and offers various easy-to-use, customizable, pre-designed email marketing templates. The higher-priced Plus plan lets you set automated email sequences and create auto-generated segmentation. Read our in-depth Constant Contact review to learn more.
• Monday.com. Monday is an excellent tool for companies with teams that coordinate email campaigns. It provides brainstorming and collaboration tools, a status board,and other workflow tools. Unlike some other services, it doesn’t send emails from within its platform. Instead, you can send them via Microsoft Outlook or Gmail. Monday’s pricing is based on your team’s size. Read our Monday.com review to learn more.
• Salesforce. If your company already has Salesforce Marketing Cloud, using its email platform is straightforward. You can easily harness customer data to inform your personalized and drip email campaigns. In addition to email, the service helps you develop personalized campaigns for social media marketing and digital advertising. Salesforce’s AI tool analyzes data and turns it into actionable insights. Read our Salesforce Marketing Cloud review to learn more. 
• Campaigner. Campaigner offers robust automation features with triggers that will automatically send out pre-written emails, including automated customer service messages, form responses, birthday emails and drip campaigns. It also lets you connect your social media feeds to your emails for a multichannel marketing strategy to increase engagement. Read our Campaigner review for more on the service’s features and pricing.
• Freshmarketer. If you want to personalize your emails but don’t have a CRM, Freshmarketer may be a good choice. It has a CRM you can purchase that you connect to your email. Freshmarketer can send emails to subscribers based on how they have responded to previous communications. It also integrates with several other software platforms, including Gmail, Shopify, SMS and Zapier. 

Personalized content engages your target audience

If you’re trying to capitalize on your content, there is no better way to reach your audience and increase brand awareness than by delivering personalized content to a customer’s or prospect’s inbox. Companies pay millions of dollars annually to reach their target consumers and capture their attention. Thankfully, it’s easy to use email marketing to grow your business with the help of exceptional marketing software and personalization techniques.

Megan Totka contributed to the reporting and writing in this article.