Email marketing is one of the many types of digital marketing. It is an extremely personal and specialized form of marketing that has immense potential for lead conversions.
Email marketing can be bolstered with the use of behavioral targeting (discussed in next section). Today we are going to check out how behavioral targeting personalizes email marketing and what benefits that brings.
What is Behavioral Targeting?
Behavioral targeting is the act of evaluating a person’s online behavior on your platform such as an app, website or online store to gauge their interests and preferences in order to market to them in ways that they are more receptive to.
For example, a person who frequently browses in the DIY (do it yourself) home repairs section of your store would be more receptive to advertisements about tools such as hammers, nails, drills, etc., etc.
It is an incredibly effective method of increasing user engagement and converting leads. It allows companies and their marketing teams to run segmented/targeted campaigns. According to HubSpot, using segmented campaigns can result in a whopping 760% increase in revenue.
Since 64% of all small companies use email marketing as their main marketing method, they can benefit immensely by employing behavioral targeting.
How to Personalize Emails Using Behavioral Targeting?
Emails can be personalized based on the data that has been collected for behavioral targeting. The data collected can include:
⦁ Time spent by the user on specific pages on the company’s website.
⦁ Any queries that were filed through email or the website.
⦁ Products/services that were previously bought by the user.
⦁ Ads that users interacted with or completely ignored.
⦁ User age and gender.
And quite a lot of other data. Using the information gathered, marketers can proceed to divide their customer base into segments. Each segment caters to people who have particular interests.
Once categories dealing with different buyer personas have been created, marketers can proceed to send emails that are related to the interests and motivations of each segment.
And that is what personalized emails are; exposing your customers to things they are or may be interested in.
Benefits of Behavioral Targeting
Behavioral targeting as we already mentioned is very effective. It has many benefits and results in a win-win situation for both customers and companies. The customers get to be happy with their purchase and the company gets to make a profit.
Here are some benefits of using behavioral targeting for personalized email marketing.
⦁ Improve Engagement
Getting people to engage with your company is the first step in converting them into loyal customers. People need to be sufficiently interested in your company before they will be willing to engage with it at any level.
A targeted email works wonders in that regard. Compared to an unsolicited and targeted email, a targeted and personalized message can usually bring an interested party right to your website.
You can use a creative summarizing tool to condense such targeted emails. Using such tools ensures that the quality of writing is good and the material is engaging. Which is a necessity of email marketing.
Email engagement is one of the top metrics that is used to measure content performance. Approximately 90% of the companies track it for that purpose. Hence, being able to increase it using behavioral targeting is a huge benefit.
⦁ Increase Lead Conversion Rate
Traditionally, lead conversion is thought to be when an interested party makes a purchase and converts into a customer. Usually, the purchase is done after a bit of…recce by the customer.
However, in digital marketing, lead conversion applies to any action that moves the interested party further along the sales funnel until they finally become a buyer.
Using this definition, just getting someone to sign up on your platform or subscribe to your newsletter counts as “lead conversion”.
Behavioral targeting in emails allows marketers to craft such mails that compel the intended audience to either sign up or buy a service/product.
Just asking them to fill out a form or complete a survey using personalized emails can get a lot of results. If they do end up doing these actions, you will only get more data to personalize the mails even further.
⦁ Reduce Bounce
Bounce in email marketing is when an email is either not opened at all or opened for a few seconds before being discarded.
A high bounce rate is bad for email marketing as email services can take it as a sign that your company is spewing spam. And they will automatically put your mails in the spam folders rather than displaying them in the main and primary inbox.
Personalized emails can massively reduce the bounce rate. When the subject and content of the mail is interesting to the recipient, they will take the time to read it and maybe even follow the call-to-actions (CTAs) present in the email.
Email open rate is rated at 19.8% across all industries. However, targeted mails can increase that number.
⦁ Increase ROI
ROI stands for Return on Investment. It refers to the amount of profit you earn compared to the investment you make in any business venture.
A better ROI signifies that the investment was small while the profit was large. A poor ROI signifies that the investment was large but the profit was small or nonexistent.
Marketing campaigns require huge investments. But the profit is never guaranteed.
However, email marketing has very good ROI. Pair that with behavioral targeting and you have a very nice combination. According to an “emailmonday.com” report from 2015, 77% of ROI comes from targeted campaigns.
That is a huge number and should tell you how advantageous personalized and targeted emails are.
Where to Use Behavioral Targeting Emails?
There are a number of use cases where emails are very effective. Here are a few scenarios where you can use personalized emails.
⦁ Checking up on Abandoned Carts
For a variety of reasons, people tend to not abandon their online shopping carts. However, what this tells the marketers is that the person is interested enough in the products that they almost made the conscious decision to buy them.
Sending them an email, that reminds them of the cart and provides a small discount on the products is a very effective method for boosting lead conversions.
A small thing to note is that you shouldn’t wait too long before following up on an abandoned cart. Usually sending an email on the next day gets a favorable response. Waiting too long, however, can result in a useless email, as by that time the person may have already solved their issues for which they needed the product.
⦁ Following Up on People Who Browse but Don’t Buy
You may notice that some people visit your website and browse through your catalogue quite frequently, but they don’t buy anything.
You can send them an email and offer them some bundle, package or a discount on the products they frequent the most.
You can even use this opportunity to try and up-sell those products and convince the prospective buyer to purchase a better version of the product.
⦁ Offer Custom Packages and Prices
We have seen that offering discounts on abandoned carts and frequently browsed products is very effective. But there is another way to utilize this.
Behavioral targeting enables you to create very specific audience/buyer personas. You can send custom emails to people who fall into these categories. These emails should offer them packages or deals that are not normally available on your site.
You can include discounts, “buy one get one free” deals, or even bundles that cost less than the sum of their parts.
Following up these offers with a catchy text that goes something like “Only for you, follow this link to avail this incredible offer…” or something along those lines, can really boost your lead conversion.
Conclusion
And there you have it.
Now you know what behavioral targeting is, how it can be used for personalizing emails and some use cases where you can apply it and reap the benefits.
It is important to note that you should never go too deep into profiling your clients. They can easily get spooked if you show them that you know so much about them.
To mitigate this, you should always be transparent about your data collection methods.
Clarify in your mails that the data is collected only from your own platform. This can prevent raising privacy concerns. Always stick to ethical sources when collecting data.