Target Your Email Marketing - For Free
Part 1 of 2

This tutorial will help you create more targeted, actionable email marketing campaigns without investing in additional software or infrastructure.

By tapping into resources that already exist within your company, you can significantly enhance the effectiveness and profitability of each email campaign.

Your Current Email Marketing Strategy

When it comes to the ever-changing world of email marketing technology, you should periodically evaluate your current situation. This will highlight any “gaps” that exist between what you’re currently doing and where the email marketing industry has gone. While the newest technology can be advantageous, it is always prudent to ensure that the benefits outweigh the costs involved in acquiring and adapting to the new product.

If you are currently creating and sending email marketing messages to your customers, or to a general consumer database, you probably have enough email marketing infrastructure at your fingertips.

To take your email marketing strategies to a higher, more targeted level, you should already have the ability to perform the following basic functions:

1. Create / upload email lists.
2. Create / send email communications
3. Track campaign results

If you don’t have these abilities, there are plenty of cost-effective (or even free) solutions out there. Here’s a link to a Buyer's Guide to Email Marketing.

Targeted Email Campaigns - No More Mass Emails

According to a new research study, the top two reasons consumers do not open and read their email are a persistently high frequency of mail in their inbox and a general lack of interest in subject matter. The report explains that the vast majority of consumers actually want marketers to demonstrate that they know:

•  The types of products or services they like
•  The types of offers they like
•  Whether they are a new or returning customer
•  Their communications preferences
•  Their shopping habits (e.g., online searching, in-store visits, catalog purchases, etc.)

So the question becomes: how do you obtain and use this information to create targeted email campaigns?

Locate Your Customer Data

Most companies engage their customers with market research. Whether it is in the form of web surveys, telephone interviews, focus groups or transactional history, someone in your company is probably learning about your customers.

Here are a few important steps to follow:

1. Your first task is to speak with those who manage the acquisition of qualitative
     and quantitative customer data. Explain to them the purpose of your targeted
     email marketing campaigns and solicit their help with the tasks below.

2. Identify which types of customer data you have at your fingertips. This will define
     the method in which you use it to create targeted email campaigns (see the next
     section: Building Customer Profiles).

3. Determine whether your customer data was obtained with permission that allows
     you to use it for marketing purposes. In some cases, it may be sufficient if your
     privacy policy states that the data collected may be used to inform customers
     about various products or services. In other cases, you may require customers to
     specifically opt in to receive marketing emails from you. Don’t worry if you don’t
     have this permission. You can still build targeted email campaigns.

4. Find out if all pieces of customer data can be exported to a common file format
     that is compatible with your email marketing software, such as .csv, .xls, or
     .xlsx files. Finding this out ahead of time will make your life easier later on.

5. Determine to what extent the data might need to be “cleansed”. You may wish to
     remove old data records, duplicate records, etc. so that you have more relevant
     and actionable customer data.

Read "Part Two" Of This Tutorial

Read part two of this tutorial, which covers: Building Customer Profiles, Creating Targeted Email Marketing Messages and Launching Your Email Marketing Campaign.

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