Sending irrelevant emails can readers into unengaged contacts. Sending them repeatedly, all but guarantees their unsubscribe.

To keep subscribers engaged you need to consider email segmentation as a core element of your email marketing strategy. Segmenting your audience base allows you to send personalized emails that reflect the customers’ needs and wants. The more you’re able to do this, the easier it’ll be to convert and retain customers.

Below are some key segments you should be building to optimize your email marketing performance.

Why email segmentation is important?

Every time you send a targeted email to your segments, you’re one step closer to sending personalized content. The more you refine your audience segments, the more relevant and personalized your marketing will feel when it lands in a subscriber’s inbox.

There is a number of ways you can use email segmentation in your emails to personalize them.  In the following sections, we’ll explore tactics for different industries to master the art of email segmentation.

General email segmentation

Every email marketer, from beginner to well-seasoned professionals, should have a collection of general segments built and ready to use when the campaign demands it.

These usually use the explicit data customers hand over in exchange for a more personalized experience. Demographic data such as gender, age, and location are all examples of explicit data and should form the basis of your email segmentation strategy.

Marketing preferences collected through your preference center should also be a priority for serious email marketers. You should be collecting preferences such as favorite products, interests, and newsletters they’d like to receive. This will give you unprecedented insight into your customers and empower them to personalize their own experiences.

B2B segmentation

As well as segmenting based on demographic data B2B marketers can use lead scoring to segment and target specific audience groups.

Segments based on whether a prospect is “cold”, “warm”, “hot”, or “red hot” enables you to send targeted messages designed to tip them into the next category. For example, you can target your “red hot” segment with invitations to book calls with your sales team. Or, you can target your “warm” contacts with educational download content to drive them into the “hot” prospect category.

Ecommerce segmentation

Ecommerce brands have a wealth of customer data at their fingertips. From past purchases to total money spent, every insight adds value to your relationship with customers.

You can take these insights further by segmenting based on customers’ RFM scores. RFM – recency, frequency, and monetary – models help ecommerce brands group customers based on their shopping habits.

Dotdigital’s RFM modeling tool groups shoppers into eight personas which you can use to create audience segments. These personas are:

• Lost
• At-risk
• Can’t lose
• Need nurturing
• High potential
• Recent customers
• Loyalists
• Champions

Segmenting your audience based on these personas helps you identify what each group needs. For example, during the sales period, you can offer “Loyalist” and “Champion” segments exclusive pre-sale access. Or you can target your “Need nurturing” segment with engaging newsletter content that helps them develop stronger connections with your brand.

Internal communication segmentation

A lot of internal communication and HR teams tend to rely on their internal email providers to connect with staff, but the benefit of using an automation platform is unprecedented.

One of the biggest perks is the ability to segment your workforce. Whether you’re sending important updates to managers, onboarding new staff, or targeting specific office locations, segmentation will enable you to get messages out quickly and efficiently.

Direct-to-consumer (D2C) segmentation

A lot of emerging D2C brands offer products and services to consumers on a subscription basis. These membership-based businesses need to connect with customers to keep the contract rolling.

Targeting audience segments based on how long they’ve been subscribed to your services, and the type or level of subscription they have is a great place to start. You can ensure your loyal customers are rewarded and kept up-to-date with your latest releases. You can also nurture subscribers paying for basic packages by regularly delivering outlining the benefits of upgrading.

Non-profit segmentation

The audience base of a non-profit organization is as diverse as they come, which means segmentation is a vital tactic. Charities, non-profits, and membership organizations regularly have to deliver important communications to stakeholders, but each stakeholder may require a different level of business insight.

Building segments for your volunteers, fundraisers, board members, ambassadors, and more will make getting emails out easier and more efficient.

Summary

By incorporating personalized strategies your email marketing, you can establish a deeper connection with subscribers and deliver content that genuinely resonates with them. This approach allows you to customize your email content to align with individual needs and preferences. This will enhance the likelihood of your subscribers opening and engaging with the message, ultimately driving desired actions.

Email segments divide audiences into groups depending on age, gender, location, interests, and more. If you don’t segment your marketing list, you’ll be sending generic content to your whole database. When customers decide they’re not receiving valuable content they become unengaged.

That’s why segmentation is such an important tactic for all email marketing professionals.

Why is email segmentation important?

We’ve already mentioned how segmentation can improve your email engagement levels, but let’s dive a bit deeper. Why should you use segmentation and what are the benefits?

Not all subscribers are the same

Each of your subscribers will have very different expectations for your brand. One-size-fits-all approaches don’t work. In the same way, you target different personas, different audience groups have specific goals when they subscribe to your marketing.

Email segmentation helps you identify common characteristics among them. As you learn more about your customers, your segments can get more granular. The deeper you go, the more likely you are to convert readers. You’re personalizing emails based on their shared interests and helping them achieve their goals.

Different stages of the sales cycle

Readers will be at different stages of the sales cycle when your email lands in their inbox. To maximize your impact and their experience, it’s important you target customers with the content they need, every step of the way.

You can use segmentation to group your audience according to their stage in the journey. If they have just joined your marketing list, you should be sending them welcome emails and content to introduce your brand. When they’ve made a purchase recently, they’ll need follow-up content to keep them engaged.

Failing to connect with customers at the key stages of your sales cycle, risks losing them altogether. Segmentation makes the likelihood of missing these opportunities significantly smaller.

Better results

Because of the benefits outlined above, you’ll see better results when you send segmented email marketing. You’ll be targeting the right customer, with the right message, at the right stage of the journey. This will lead to more conversions, sales, and ultimately revenue for your brand. If you’re looking to improve your email marketing metrics, segmentation is a must.

Improved deliverability

The more relevant the content your send, the more opens you will get. The more your open rates improve the better your email reputation will be. Everything’s connected.

When you send targeted emails to a segmented database, you’re engaging with your customers more. This will encourage your customers to interact with you on a deeper level.

As customers begin to expect relevant and engaging emails, they’ll open and interact with your emails more often. The more readers engage with your email marketing email providers will recognize you as a reputable and trustworthy brand. Accidentally landing in the spam folder will be a thing of the past.

Enhanced customer experience

When you leverage email segmentation you can improve your customer experience. By delivering tailored, relevant emails to your subscribers, you address their unique needs and interests, making them feel valued and seen. This personalized approach fosters a stronger connection between your brand and your customers, ultimately leading to improved satisfaction and customer loyalty.

How to segment your email list

There are five key ways brands should be segmenting email marketing lists.

1. Demographics

Demographic segments use customer information such as age, gender, marital status, and job title. You should collect this data when new subscribers sign up to receive your email marketing. The more information you gather during the early stage of your relationship, the more advanced you can make your segments.

2. Geographical

Targeting customers based on their location has a massive influence on purchase decisions. Especially if you’re driving shoppers to brick-and-mortar stores or providing delivery updates, customer location is essential data to have. Modern shoppers love convenience. By targeting geographical segments you can drive customers into making spontaneous decisions.

3. Marketing preferences

You should always be collecting marketing preferences, especially during the welcome series in preference centers and re-engagement programs. This is data such as the departments, newsletters, or topics they’re interested in and the frequency with which they would like to hear from you. Driving customers to update their preferences will help you ensure engagement levels are high for each segment.

4. Email engagement

Email engagement metrics such as open rate and click-through rate are automatically tracked. That means it’s easy and straightforward to segment users based on how they interact with your email marketing. Whether it’s non-openers or readers who’ve clicked specific links, targeting these segments will have a huge impact on your results.

5. Behavioral

Behavioral segmentation is the most advanced email segmentation tactic. It’s based on customer behavior on your other channels such as your website. Specific page hits, frequency of visits, and recent activity are just a couple of the segments possible that help gives your email marketing a hyper-personalized feel.  You can also use data like purchase history and average order value to create behavioral audience segments.

eRFM segmentation

eRFM is a model that helps businesses profile customers’ shopping habits. Depending on the RFM score a customer gets, you can identify segments from ‘champions’ and ‘recent customers’ to ‘high potential’ and ‘at risk’.

Three factors are considered when categorizing audiences:

1. Recency: how recently did the customer purchase?
2. Frequency: how often do the purchase?
3. Monetary value: how much do they spend?

Dotdigital’s eRFM modeling tool provides eight separate personas you can use to segment and target customers with relevant content.

SMS segmentation

SMS marketing is being adopted by brands around the world. Compared to email marketing’s average open rate of around 89.42% (due to Apple MPP making open rates unreliable), SMS has a read rate of 98% within the first five minutes. It’s a quick and effective way to reach audiences with important information.

But it’s also becoming the new channel for batch-and-blast customers.

Like email marketing, you should segment SMS audiences. This will ensure engagement and start two-way conversations.

Because of the immediacy of SMS, you should base your audience segments on data such as location and recent activity. Segmentation will help you to connect with engaged audiences and deliver relevant promotions and offers that will land with an impact.

Summary

Email segmentation is a powerful tool to improve your marketing strategy. By understanding the different ways to segment your audience and the benefits it brings, you can create tailored and relevant messaging that resonates with your subscribers. This personalized approach not only drives engagement but also fosters customer loyalty, leading to increased conversions, sales, and overall success of your marketing campaigns.

Why?

Because it’s often the first thing recipients see. And, if they check out the sender’s name first, they’ll then turn to the subject line to decide whether opening it will benefit them.

No matter how amazing your design, the level of personalization, or the fancy imagery you use, it won’t make a difference if you can’t get readers to open it in the first place.

Of course, that’s not to say creating first-class email content is a waste of time. That’s the stuff that gets the conversions and drives sales. But, to get the opens that lead to clicks, you need to work for it.

We’ve got simple tips to help you create the perfect email subject line. Follow these, and we guarantee you’ll have the best email subject lines in the business.

Personalize, personalize, personalize

If you want to increase your open rate, it’s important to personalize your subject lines. You can grab your reader’s attention by using data fields to pull in information about the customer, like name, location, or other relevant information. Additionally, targeting your message to the right audience is crucial. Personalization not only makes customers feel valued and understood, but it also provides useful content that can make their life easier. In an inbox full of generic messaging, personalization can set your email apart.

Use artificial intelligence (AI)

If you’re looking for a way to take any email subject line to the next level – say hello to WinstonAI. This innovative tool uses cutting-edge Microsoft Azure GPT3.5 technology to help you come up with the perfect subject line that will make your campaigns stand out from the crowd. Plus, WinstonAI can even analyze your past campaigns to learn your preferred tone, wording, and structure. This can help you free up time when you’re stuck figuring out what the perfect subject line is. 

Vary subject line length

Many email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, and more cut subject lines when they’re being viewed by web-based readers. Usually, the cut-off point for this is around the 55-character limit. Mobile inboxes, on the other hand, commonly cut off subject lines at about 30 characters.

To ensure that your subject lines are making an impact, be sure to check your campaign reporting. This will help you identify the device on which your customers are opening. Then, you can plan your subject lines around this suggested length.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you must strictly stick to these character limits. One of the best parts of working on subject lines is the ability to experiment. Don’t think about it as trial and error – think of it as trial and trial and trial until success.

Include a call to action

You want customers to complete an action. That’s why you’re emailing, so why not be clear about what you want? Positive action verbs are a good option as long as you’re careful not to come across as spammy. Think along the lines of “get yours,” “discover,” “save”, “join us”, and “book today.”

If you’re worried about coming across as a spam sender (we’ll be covering how best to avoid this later), then try making key benefits or propositions the CTA in your email subject line. If the key benefit of shopping with you comes from your offer of free shipping, push this in your subject line. If you’re offering student discounts, shout about it to drive opens.

Essentially, you should be thinking, “What will drive my readers to convert?” Whatever the answer, try running with it in your email subject line.

Be relevant

Relevancy is key. Whether it’s your email copy or your subject lines, shoppers will only answer your emails if it’s going to benefit them.

Don’t be vague or mysterious. Intriguing subject lines might generate good open rates, but your end goal is click-throughs and conversions. And you’re not going to get those if your email isn’t related to your subject line. In the long run, this could actually be detrimental to your brand. By misleading them, you could erode their fragile trust in you.

So, keep your subject lines related to your key message. It’ll increase the quality of opens and consequently improve your click-through rate.

Tell, don’t sell

Steer clear adding unnecessary descriptive adjectives to your subject lines. Words like ‘amazing’, ‘unbeatable’, and ‘stunning’ actually do very little to convince recipients to open.

Our Global benchmark report revealed that false urgency in subject lines don’t perform well. Words that were once considered to inspire action are driving inaction. Especially in retailer sectors, words like ‘exclusive’, ‘days’, ‘ends’, ‘save’, ‘extra’, and ‘last’ were the worst performing. 

Keep it simple and tell readers what they can expect from your email. There’s no need to make grand promises and oversell what is simply a new product launch, event, or mid-season sale.

Once again, this will improve the quality of your opens. When it’s clear to the reader what’s inside you’re giving them more reason to convert.

Avoid spam words

It’s every email marketer’s nightmare to have their hard word flagged as spam.

After all the work that goes into creating a fully optimized email marketing campaign, you don’t want to be the one in five that gets caught by the spam filter.

Spam filters are constantly checking for specific triggers that indicate an email might be spam:

• Specific word choice
• Messages in ALL CAPS
• Emails without an unsubscribe button
• Links to unknown or questionable websites
• Colorful, hard to read, and different sized fonts

Typically spam filters look for suspicious words or phrases associated with scams, schemes, free gifts, and more.

What to avoid:

• Spam words that make exaggerated claims and promises, e.g. #1, 100% satisfied, earn money, free consultation, and satisfaction guaranteed.
• Words that create unnecessary urgency and pressure, e.g. act now, apply now, get started now, please read, while supplies last, and more.
• Spammy words or words that imply shady or unethical behavior, e.g. cancel at any time, no hidden charges, meet singles, etc.
• Words that are considered jargon or typically used in legal documents, e.g. as seen on, bonus, certified, cheap, join millions, this message contains, quote, and more.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t EVER use these words in your emails. It just means to use these words and phrases responsibly.

The best performing subject lines have included words like ‘reasons’, ‘introducing’, ‘discover’, and ‘recent’. This indicates that customers are looking for content that inspires, such as ‘introducing our new range. They want brands to do more than simply push a product, they want you to sell it.

Write your subject line last

To ensure your email subject line is clear, relevant, and engaging enough to convert, you should be writing it last.

After you’ve finalized the design and written your email copy, you’ll know the exact message you’re trying to communicate. With that in mind, deciding what to include in your email subject line will be much easier.

Test your subject lines

No matter what tactic you try or the results you get, you need to test your subject lines. What works one day might not work a couple of days later. Or what increases opens for one segment may have absolutely no effect on another. That’s why you should be constantly split testing your email campaigns.

Summary

By experimenting with these subject line tips and analyzing your audience’s response, you can identify what resonates best with them. Remember to keep it concise, intriguing, and relevant to the content of your email. With practice and persistence, you’ll be able to consistently craft subject lines that grab your audience’s attention and improve the success of your email marketing campaigns.

Understanding why readers unsubscribe

While marketing list depreciation is expected, you want to keep minimal. To properly optimize customers’ email marketing experiences, you need to understand why people unsubscribe in the first place.

Surveying customers at the point of unsubscription is the only way to gather real insight into their actions. This will give you a clear idea of what elements of the customer experience you need to prioritize improving.

3 top tips to reduce unsubscribes

1. Personalize

In the modern world of marketing, personalization is essential to reducing unsubscribes. Whether you’re a B2B, B2C, or non-profit brand, customers expect uniquely personal experiences from brands. Failing to meet this expectation will drive disappointed and unengaged customers to unsubscribe.

Personalization can take many forms. From using first names and dynamic content to segmentation, all personalization tactics have a positive impact on the reader’s experience. By tailoring your message to align with individual preferences, subscribers are more likely to engage with your email and maintain a long-term relationship with your brand.

To ensure your content is relevant to your readers, create actionable segments. Nobody wants to read irrelevant content, and if your content doesn’t apply to them, they’ll ignore your marketing efforts. By targeting specific groups based on factors like gender, company size, or location, you can ensure that your content is tailored to the individual reader.

Dynamic content blocks such as product recommendations also go a long way in personalizing your email marketing. Especially using AI-powered product recommendations, every email will be automatically populated with content unique to the reader based on their previous behavior.

Nothing demonstrates how well you know your readers more than a personalized email. It speaks directly to their interests and behaviors, making your email one they’ll want to open. The more you deliver relevant content, the more value customers will get from the relationship. Unsubscribe rates will fall significantly when you deliver one-to-one marketing.

2. Re-engage

There are many tools in a marketer’s arsenal that can help you identify disengaged customers. From eRFM to lead scoring, you should keep a close eye on your customers’ behavior to prevent losing them.

An automated re-engagement program is a perfect way to bring customers back before they leave you forever. Using insights gathered from your RFM persona tracking or lead scoring, you can trigger this program as soon as a customer lapses.

Well-timed “we miss you” emails, teamed with an incentive can drive a shopper back to your website. You can also use this program to drive subscribers to update their marketing preferences or complete a survey. By asking for feedback or encouraging a review of their marketing preferences, you’re demonstrating your commitment to the customer. It’s a clear demonstration that you care about their experience and are willing to change to fulfill their needs.

This will go a long way to keeping readers happy. All too often customers are bombarded with marketing emails, so giving them control of their relationship with you will set you high above the competition. And no one will unsubscribe from a brand that clearly cares about its customers.

3. Familiarize

Don’t wait until you’re on the cusp of losing a customer to remind them why your brand is the one. Newsletters – real ones, not just sales emails masquerading as newsletters – are essential for establishing strong relationships with your readers.

You should think about what kind of content will add the most value to your readers’ experience. Educational articles about how to get the most out of your products and services are an automatic win. They prove that you care about their overall experience, not just sales.

Your brand’s story is also important. To establish a strong bond between the customer and your brand, you need to show them the people behind the brand. The more human you are to the reader, the stronger the relationship will be. By demonstrating your brand values around economic, environmental, and social issues, the reader sees that you are passionate about the same issues as them.

Summary

For an effective email marketing strategy, it’s important to reduce unsubscribes. You can achieve this by implementing these three quick and efficient methods. By taking a tailored approach that aligns with your audience’s expectations and desires, you can foster long-lasting relationships and drive success in your email marketing campaigns. Don’t let unsubscribes undermine your efforts; take action today and keep your email list thriving!

Consistently sending the same message will eventually damage your brand reputation, increase unsubscribes, and ultimately hold up conversions. Sales will dip and profits will suffer. All because you failed to engage customers enough.

Targeted emails don’t have to be complicated or hyper-personalized works of art. Successful email marketing strategies are all about understanding and catering to your audience’s individual needs and preferences. Read on to learn four key benefits of targeted email marketing. These benefits will revolutionize your campaigns and boost your business growth.

What is targeted email marketing?

We all know that email marketing is the most successful channel available to marketers today. Email marketing offers $42 ROI for every $1 spent. But that’s just the beginning of what’s possible.

You can significantly improve your ROI, sales, and profits by adopting targeted email marketing.

Targeted email marketing is a way of ensuring your emails make an impact in the inbox. Using the information you already hold about your customers, you can send tailored messages to specific sets of subscribers. You target them.

To improve your email marketing strategy, it’s important to segment and personalize based on customer information like their interests, age, and gender. This level of personalization impresses readers and improves their experience with your brand. This increases the likelihood that they’ll act on your calls to action and remain loyal customers.

4 benefits of targeted email marketing

Let’s look at these four benefits of targeted email marketing…

Improve relevancy

Segmentation ensures you’re sending a more relevant message to your audience. You can divide your customer base into distinct groups based on shared characteristics, such as demographics, preferences, past purchase behavior, or engagement history. 

By categorizing customers into these segments, you can tailor your email campaigns to address the unique needs, desires, and expectations of each specific group. Customers who receive relevant content are more likely to engage with your email marketing efforts. Customers will click and convert because targeted emails appeal to their goals and offer value to them.

It’s most effective to gather information and segment new subscribers through their welcome program. You should regularly prompt customers during their customer journey to update their marketing preferences.

Segmentation is an essential and under-utilized email marketing tactic and helps build stronger connections with your audience. But, the more you segment and target your audience, the better your results will be.

Increase ROI

Sending targeted and personalized emails leads to higher engagement rates and increased sales conversions. With more customers converting, your revenue will naturally rise. By understanding your customers’ preferences and needs, you can provide them with targeted discounts and promotions that cater to their interests. This approach allows you to deliver the appropriate message at the right moment, resulting in higher customer engagement. When you deliver relevant messages, engaged readers convert faster. And more conversions mean more revenue.

If you know customers are interested in a specific product range, target them with offers that appeal to them. Even basic segmentation such as age and gender significantly affects your ROI. Marketers can enjoy ROI increases of up to 760% when sending targeted, segmented campaigns.

Better customer relationships

We’ve already mentioned that improved relevancy in your emails will demonstrate your brand’s value to the customer. In the long run, it will also help you build and nurture long-term relationships with your customers. 

When you know your customers and segment and personalize your emails accordingly, customers will hold your marketing in high regard. By regularly sending relevant content, customers will develop high expectations from your emails. The more you meet – and exceed – these expectations, the more their trust and respect for your brand will increase.

Longer customer retention

Targeted email marketing not only makes building relationships with subscribers easier; it also makes retaining them easier. 

Creating personalized and targeted email marketing campaigns can greatly enhance customer retention. It’s important to build strong relationships with both potential and existing customers by continuously learning about their preferences and optimizing your email campaigns. 

By doing so, you increase engagement and ensure your customers receive value from your emails. This fosters loyalty and customer satisfaction, ultimately leading to repeat purchases and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

Shoppers who value your experiences will seek you out, in and out of the inbox. If you replicate these experiences in your cross-channel marketing they’ll think about you first, every time.

Optimize for ultimate success

It’s important to optimize your marketing strategy as customers’ needs and goals change with every conversion. Encourage customers to update their marketing preferences and keep track of email marketing metrics such as opens, click-through rates, and ROI to determine which tactics are most effective. Adjust your campaigns accordingly to align with your customer’s interests and behaviors.

Summary

By using targeted email marketing strategies you can connect with your audience, increase ROI, build stronger customer relationships, and improve retention rates. It’s a powerful tool that can significantly impact your digital marketing efforts. To stay ahead of the competition, it’s highly recommended to invest in targeted email marketing strategies to take your marketing campaigns to the next level.

What is customer intent?

Customer intent is often confused with buyer’s intent – i.e. the thoughts or actions directing customers to make a purchase. In basic terms, that would be the moment a shopper enters a brick-and-mortar store and heads to the jeans aisle. Their intent to buy is clear.

However, in the wide world of marketing, buyer intent doesn’t take into account the wide range of online actions customers can take before converting.

Some actions can be simple, such as an immediate click-through from your homepage to a product page. But with the extensive range of channels customers can interact with you on, there are many actions that, when added together, can express their intent.

Why is customer intent important?

Today’s customers demand fast, friction-free experiences. They want brands to understand what they’re after and help them achieve their goals in real-time.

At the same time, marketers are asked to do more with less; to make marketing budgets go further.

Identifying moments of customer intent is essential to meeting both goals. For marketers, data insights that highlight micro-moments of customer intent provide you with more opportunities to convert customers and drive revenue.

For customers, brands that use customer intent can deliver personalized messages at the right time, making them feel valued and driving them into action.

Why is customer intent more powerful than demographics?

Marketers who exclusively rely on demographic information to target customers risk missing more than 70% of potential mobile shoppers.

Demographic information and marketing preferences are great tools to help marketers build a customer profile and understand what they want from you. Unfortunately, they offer little insight into what they’re looking for in the moment.

When customers are looking for something; a product, a solution, or a service, they go to the web. More often than not, they turn to their smartphones. These intent-filled micro-moments are what brands need to target to connect with people.

How do you identify customer intent?

Marketing is no longer as simple as ushering customers down the funnel. The customer journey isn’t linear but cyclical and chaotic. We expect shoppers to visit our sites repeatedly and communicate with us on multiple channels before they’re ready to make a decision.

So now we know that we’re looking for intent-filled interactions to signify customer intent, how do we determine what these moments are?

Collect actionable data

Demographic and preference data is essential for creating personalized and engaging marketing messages. However, you need to collect more than just customer data. Actions such as category page views, product page views, registrations, on-site searches, and landing page clicks should all be measured.

These can help you identify patterns in customer behavior before they convert, such as how many times they visit a page before the point of conversion. You will then be able to target specific high-intent actions to drive customers towards completing your goal.

Spot the key customer starting points

Your homepage might be the page most frequently landed on, but it doesn’t reveal real customer intent. Instead, you need to decide where the customer journey begins. Site searches are always good indicators of customer intent. Shoppers are looking for something specific so you should act on this and make the journey to conversion as simple as possible.

Similarly, specific category pages or feature pages can clearly indicate what customers are looking for. If a customer knows what they’re after, then this is a vital place for you to track and target.

Create pre-intent content

Understanding customer intent goes hand-in-hand with understanding the pain points that have driven them to your website in the first place. By strategizing your content marketing to focus on these specific pain points, utilizing blogs and learning resource pages, you can capture customer intent before they realize yours is the solution they need.

For example, if your brand offers a kitchen fitting service you can create content targeting first-time homeowners with a checklist of things they need to consider when renovating a kitchen. This will help you pre-emptively capture customers interested in finding out more about your service. You can then guide them through your customer journey and lead them to the point of conversion.

How to use customer intent in your marketing automation?

Targeting intent-filled micro-moments increases revenue. There are several scenarios where customer intent can trigger timely, relevant, and personalized marketing messages.

Abandoned browse and cart abandonment emails

Active carts or high-intent page visits demonstrate clear intent. To turn this intent into conversions you need to build abandoned cart or abandoned browse programs. Our Global benchmark report shows that acting quickly can make a big difference – 45% of abandoned carts are recovered within 2 hours. So, it’s important to re-engage your customers quickly and guide them back to your site to boost the likelihood of securing a sale.

Repeat page hits

As part of your work identifying customer intent, you should have a clear idea about which pages on your website are essential to your customers’ journey. Using this intelligence, you can create automation programs that are triggered when a browser views the same page three times.

For example, if you’re a furniture company and have noticed customers frequently visiting your payment plans page, you can use this insight to trigger a campaign. When a shopper views the page numerous times, a friendly ‘ask us anything’ email might be just the push they need to convert.

Customer engagement

Customer modeling tools such as eRFM and lead scoring help you measure subscriber engagement. You can identify which customers are actively interacting with your brand and which have lapsed.

Customer modeling triggers campaigns when customers move between audience groups. So, when a customer stops engaging with your marketing and falls into a needs-nurturing or lapsed group, you can automatically enroll them into a win-back automation campaign.

Similarly, when an unengaged subscriber starts re-engaging, you can leverage the data you already have on them to deliver a personalized campaign that enhances their customer experience. Product recommendation blocks and dynamic content are just a couple of ways to drive newly engaged customers to convert.

Summary

Customer intent is the secret weapon for creating effective, relevant, and persuasive marketing campaigns. By examining your audience’s behavior, segmenting them based on their intent, and delivering tailored content that speaks to their individual needs, you’ll unlock unprecedented levels of customer engagement, conversion, and growth. So, tap into customer intent today, and take your marketing strategy to the next level.

Unfortunately, there is a significant disconnect between expectation and reality in CX. In research carried out by Adweek and Accenture Interactive, they found that while 80% of brands believe they deliver a superior customer experience, only 8% of customers agree.

Brands have to go further and break down boundaries to meet customers’ expectations.

What are interactive customer experiences?

Customer experiences have changed. Brands can do more with customer data. From personalization to augmented reality, savvy shoppers know brands can deliver exceptional experiences.

As a result, CX is less about fulfilling wants and needs and more about meeting increased expectations. Customers compare experiences with diverse brands across different industries. That means that a shopper who has a positive experience buying plants online expects a similar experience when buying anything; groceries, takeaways, jewelry.

Interactive experiences will help you continuously meet these experiences. Interactive content personalizes customers’ interactions with your brands and boosts overall engagement.

Think online questionnaires, web-based calculators, or gamified content. It’s content that lets users personalize and participate in it.

In-email customer experiences

Interactive experiences can come in many formats, but in recent years, email marketing has made massive strides towards providing customers with unique experiences.

AMP for email

AMP for email is a powerful tool that revolutionizes customer experience by allowing you to build web-like experiences right in their inbox. It allows readers to interact with your email and choose their own path.

This innovative feature is an excellent asset when it comes to showcasing various aspects of your brand, products, or services. While offering captivating and personalized customer experiences, you can also guide users towards accomplishing a specific goal. However, you also want to drive users to complete a specific goal. Using an AMP-powered carousel feature, email recipients can flick through your highlighted products or campaign photographs before clicking on your email’s main CTA. For example, a ‘register your interest’ button.

Similarly, customers can discover their own pathways by choosing what content they’d like to see in your email campaign. You can later use these insights to deliver a more personalized experience throughout their journey.

Real-time personalization

To create long-lasting relationships with customers, it’s important to provide a hyper-personalized experience. Real-time personalization is a way to achieve this by using up-to-date customer data. Typically, pulling in a subscriber’s first name using data field is an example of this.You can also use location data to provide location-based dynamic content, to make the campaign super relevant to the customer. By segmenting data and getting to know your audience, you can create targeted content that resonates with them. 

GIFs and videos

GIFs and videos bring joy and delight to your email openers. They grab your subscribers’ attention immediately, keeping them engaged and scrolling down your marketing.

Embedded videos have a great engagement rate which ultimately drives more conversions. Animations and videos make communicating complex ideas simple. In a matter of seconds you can explain your latest product launches and business updates.

Advice from interactive experience experts

Odicci helps brands boost customer engagement and drive customer loyalty with interactive experiences such as quizzes, games, and product finders. These are the top tips on creating interactive and engaging emails from CEO Founder of Odicci, Jacques Prothon:

Creating emails that work: how to jazz up your email design

Just because customers are interested in receiving emails doesn’t mean that you’re keeping them engaged. Thankfully, there are many things you can do to ensure your customers are engaged with your emails. We’ve listed six ways to jazz up your email with interactive experiences.

Gamification: can you beat the high-score?

By introducing gamification into your customers’ experience, you can enhance their engagement and increase clicks and conversions. By asking people to play a game such as a memory game or a matchmaker you are tapping into the creative potential of your subscribers. Add an engaging moving gif design to drive clicks and enjoy your dwell time stats go through the roof as people will be engaged for a long time on your website. Thanks to this pinball game Virgin Holidays experienced a 47% click-through rate.

FOMO: are you one of our lucky winners?

By using elements of accomplishment, envy, ownership, and scarcity you are driving your audience towards clicks. When signing up, subscribers are expecting to receive some type of value, such as a coupon, free gift, or a contest entry. If you want subscribers to continue being engaged with your emails, keep providing something of value and make them interact online with an online scratch card or shake your phone to reveal a prize. Feelunique is driving subscribers to an interactive summer spin for a chance to win special discounts.

Enhance customer experience: swipe your preference

To enhance customer experience Central England Co-Op used an interactive “Tinderesque” swipe survey behind email to collect customer preferences and deliver more personalized emails. The swipe survey running behind an email marketing campaign drove a 28% click-through rate with 20% of surveyed customers sharing their preferences. The swipe survey is a great experience to boost clicks and drive engagement.

Rewarding customers: thank you, here is something for you

Subscribers are looking for positive experiences with brands. One of the most popular customer rewards in use by many brands is when a subscriber reaches a certain level of a loyalty program. Paperchase uses various experiences to reward members of their TreatMe Loyalty program, here is an example of Spin the Wheel on PayDay for TreatMe members only.

With loyalty you can also combine experiences with other moments such as birthdays, special moments in the year, or the launch of a product by giving exclusive access.

Customer Feedback: how did we do?

After a purchase or a delivered service use interactive experiences to ask for feedback and make that experience engaging, fun and above all easy. TeamSport used a Net Promoter Score survey to get feedback from customers after their races. Valuable information is collected for each track and customers can be rewarded afterwards.

Intrigue: what does the future hold?

Instead of engaging your audience with a standard marketing message, use email to create interest, curiosity or intrigue. Use a clever hook to invite subscribers to an interactive personality quiz or a product profiler and deliver a personalized brand interaction

A great way to deliver the message and drive clicks from your emails to these engaging experiences is to use moving GIFs that demonstrate how the reward, game, quiz or interactive promotion works in a few seconds. Using moving GIFs is the perfect way to show what engagement and reward(s) subscribers can expect. To get the best results you can create moving GIFs that are personalized or tailored to a segment, or audience.

Summary

As we know email marketing is one of the best tools to drive sales and convert leads. With interactive experiences it is possible to substantially increase your click-through rates and conversions whilst delivering great value to your audience. Don’t be intimidated these interactive experiences can be published in just a few clicks. Give it a try or contact Odicci for more information about our pre-built interactive experiences, with more than 80+ out-of-the-box experiences you won’t be disappointed.

What makes a customer journey complex?

In a world of options, too much choice can lead to decision-making paralysis. Social media channels like Instagram and TikTok bombard customers with inspiration, while Google makes it easier to discover new brands.

Travelers have an almost unlimited menu of choices when it comes to booking their trips. But with all these choices available to them, there are higher levels of procrastination and anxiety associated with making a decision.

All of this takes place during the awareness and planning stages of the customer journey.

To assist customers facing this paralysis of choice, brands need to go the extra mile to deliver relevant content. The more relevant you can make your marketing, basing your content on customers’ needs and reflecting the experiences they’re looking for, the more successful your marketing will be.

Personalizing chaotic customer journeys

It’s important to understand the customer’s journey, and even better, the stages along the way.

Using the travel and tourism industry as an example, there are five distinct stages:

1. Inspiration
2. Planning
3. Booking
4. In-trip
5. Post-trip

Inspiration: personalizing the awareness phase

67% of holiday goers will book with the brand that offers them the most help during the inspiration phase. This phase is about understanding the customers’ needs. They’re looking for inspiration and are open to possibilities.

Personalizing data capture popovers is a brilliant tactic for this stage. Travel brands can use browsing insights to personalize messages. “Not ready to book? Save this flight for later” or “Still interested in visiting Ibiza? Save your search for later”. This kind of personalization created a memorable customer experience.

By collecting travel preferences immediately, you’ll be able to understand what the customer needs to convert. What kind of experience are they looking for? What’s their budget? Are they open to cross-selling or upselling tactics?

You can better understand your target audience by developing detailed customer personas. You can segment customers based on common characteristics and behaviors, then create personas representing each segment. These personas act as archetypes to guide personalization and tailor customer experiences. For now, you have enough information to take them on a tailored welcome journey that will set the scene for the journey to come.

Planning: crafting tailored consideration communications

For travel brands, the planning stage is all about differentiation.

What makes you different from your competitors?

In this respect, it’s not much different from most other sectors. We’re all striving to stand out from the crowd.

But thanks to your personalized customer acquisition tactics, you already have the information you need to drive subscribers through the sales cycle. You know what browsers are looking for, so you should be delivering content tailored to their needs.

AI-powered product recommendations play a vital role in enhancing the travel customer experience. Using these, you can showcase tailored destination recommendations, hotel and activity suggestions, and personalized travel itineraries. These recommendations can be delivered through websites, mobile apps, or email marketing campaigns. Airbnb frequently employs this tactic to feature their most popular stays in the area users are researching.

Dynamic content is also a powerful tool to easily personalize your messaging. Displaying different content based on destination preferences helped Copa Airlines generate a 14% boost in revenue from its personalized email campaigns.

Booking: driving purchases with personal touches

A typical online travel consumer is exposed to over 38,983 micro-moments in a 60-day timeframe. During that time, they visit an average of 18 websites across multiple devices, all before making a single hotel booking. While this is slightly longer than your average decision-making process, it’s a great one to learn from.

It’s important to streamline the booking process to enhance your customers’ experience. As travel has one of the highest cart abandonment rates of any industry at around 81%. At this stage, the value of abandoned cart automation cannot be underestimated. Never let a shopper leave without sending them a recovery email.

To make it as easy as possible to continue with their journey, your recovery email should list the items in their basket or break down the details of their booking with a clear CTA. If there is something specific blocking their path to purchase, providing real-time assistance to customers’ queries live chat is a must. Together, you will be able to tip many uncertain shoppers over the line. 

You also need to tap into the FOMO effect by creating a sense of urgency. Countdown clocks and the limited number of spaces available are perfect to drive users to convert.

In-trip: personalize cross-selling and upselling opportunities

Travel brands know all about the importance of cross-selling and upselling. 38% of tour and activity bookings on vacation happen on or around the same day as doing them. 52% of travelers consider buying in-flight amenities and services when they’re delivered to their mobile devices.

Timing is everything.

To deliver the best experience possible you need to think about the many facets that will affect them. Reminders via SMS are perfect for any travel, event, or experience-orientated brand. Specific information like booking references, check-in times, and health and safety regulations will help customers have a smoother experience if they’re delivered into the palm of their hand.

Using geo-locations to know where your customers are can help you drive spontaneous decisions. You can drive customers to attend an event, join activities, or visit you in person.

This is also relevant for non-travel brands. Keeping customers informed about shipping times and delivery times will ensure their highly anticipated parcel doesn’t get sent back to the depot.

Armed with insights into their most recent orders and interactions with your brand, you can pull in relevant products, items, and services to cross- and upsell post-purchase.

Post-trip: drive long-term loyalty for an unforgettable customer experience

Good or bad, memories last.

47% of customers believe they would switch to a competitor within a day after a poor customer experience. The customer journey doesn’t end after the trip. Therefore, you must make your aftersales journey all about the customer. It’s all about making them feel like a valued part of your brand.

The best thing is, there is a whole range of automation programs that can help you deliver regular, personalized messages at key stages of the relationship.

Anniversary celebrations are a great way to demonstrate your appreciation for your customers. Pulling in their data, these emails can be used to highlight, how many miles a traveler has flown, or how many times a customer has shopped or attended one of your events. You could even consider sending follow-up emails with exclusive discounts or rewards for future travel. This will show your customers that you value their business and appreciate their loyalty.

You can also combine your feedback and review campaigns with your customer loyalty program and let customers earn points for every review they leave. Reviews are an essential part of the early stages of the customer lifecycle so the more you collect, the better. Adding incentives to these kinds of activities can help keep customers engaged with your brand, long after their journey is complete.

Summary

In the highly competitive travel industry, it’s essential to deliver a consistent experience across your customers’ journeys. By embracing personalization, you can create unforgettable experiences that leave a lasting impression, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Why is storytelling important?

Brand storytelling is important in marketing because it helps you connect with your target audience on a deeper and more emotional level. Our brains are wired to remember stories over simple facts. Stories help us retain information and create close, personal bonds. The benefits of integrating this into your marketing are obvious. 

Data can come to life through storytelling. By telling personal and emotional stories, you can capture and retain your audience’s attention. This makes your brand more relatable and memorable, setting you apart from your competitors. Successful brand storytelling can not only increase awareness and brand loyalty but also boost sales and business growth. 

Understand what customers need

Long before talk of customer-centricity started ringing out across the marketing world, the customer was essential to company success. After all, businesses would be nothing without customers to connect with. Despite this, there are still some brands out there that don’t put the customer at the center of everything they do. Instead, they focus on their ideas and assumptions about their target market without ever really getting to know them. Warning: these businesses won’t last long. 

For brands looking to grow, disregarding the customers’ needs can be irrevocably damaging. Especially in today’s market, customers are more than happy to jump ship and realign their loyalties to a brand that is willing to meet their needs and fulfill their expectations. That’s why you need to ensure you’re always learning about your customers. Understanding their goals and needs will help you engage them with your brand.

Discovering customer needs through data

Crafting a compelling brand story begins with discovering what your customers truly desire. That’s why it’s essential to collect customer data and use it in the right way. There are several effective methods to uncover these insights:

Polls, surveys and interviews

Direct conversations with customers will provide you with the richest data. You can explore the decision-making process: – What drove them to convert? – Why did they choose your brand over competitors? – Was there a specific element of the experience or your website that stood out? – How did they discover you? – What are their interests? What are they passionate about? 

By collecting this information, you will get to know your audience like never before. You can discover what is important to them and build this into your brand story. For example, if they’re passionate about supporting international development, you can introduce a new initiative supporting business programs in the developing world. Ultimately, displaying this commitment and aligning your brand values to match your audiences’ will lead to stronger, loyal relationships and rapid growth.

Monitor interactions

Interactions and customer interactivity with your brand will only grow in importance. Following Apple’s iOS 15 software, it will be interactions, not opens that help you understand customer intent. By tracking customer interactions, you can learn a great deal about the average customer’s journey toward conversion. The emails they interact with, the links they click, and the pages they visit all tell you something about what they’re trying to achieve with your brand. 

You can identify where customers’ interests lie, focusing your product or service development on what will drive engagement and growth. You can also identify moments that generate engagement or where customers drop out of the funnel. This will give you greater insight into what your audience is trying to achieve and how they want to do it.

Feedback and reviews

Customers should feel at the center of your brand story. This includes feeling like their opinion and feedback are valued. You should not only be encouraging feedback and reviews but also monitoring them to identify trends. Are customers raving about your fantastic customer service? Are they disappointed about the lack of shipping options?

By using feedback and reviews to identify these trends, you can improve your customer offering and demonstrate your commitment to a customer-centric approach. Including customers in the day-to-day running of your business gives them to chance to get fully invested in your brand. 

Customers love a brand that listens to them and values their input. By reinforcing and demonstrating this in your brand messaging, you’re helping to create more trust and strong bonds with your brand. Section on reviews also being great marketing material when positive. Use these at various touchpoints across the customer journey. From social media to checkout. Social proof is invaluable.

Customer loyalty is the ultimate goal

As a marketer, your ultimate objective is to enhance customer loyalty and retention. To achieve this, you can create a brand story that is based on customer data. Showing that you understand the needs of your customers fosters satisfaction and exceeds their expectations. This customer-centric approach positions your brand for long-term success and growth.

Discover how Dotdigital help you create unforgettable brand narratives that resonate with your audience by reading our best practice guide.

Customer engagement models like RFM enable marketers to segment audiences in more sophisticated ways. Using insights such as the recency, frequency, and monetary value of past purchases (RFM) enables you to identify customers who have the highest potential. But how do you know whether these shoppers are truly engaged? 

What is eRFM?

To determine whether a customer is truly engaged with your marketing efforts, you need to measure their engagement and interaction with your brand. That’s where eRFM comes in.  

Businesses use eRFM as a segmentation framework to categorize customers based on their previous behaviors and actions. To effectively use eRFM to segment customers, businesses need to collect and analyze customer data across the four metrics: engagement, recency, frequency, and monetary value.

eRFM: the future of segmentation

eRFM is the next level of RFM. As well as measuring the recency, frequency, and monetary value of past purchases, our customer modeling tool also looks at engagements like email opens and online activity. This means that you can segment customers based on their recent interactions with your brand, as well as their past purchase behavior.  

Each RFM persona receives an engagement score, so you can identify customers who are primed for conversion, and those who need to be re-engaged. By using eRFM, you can tailor your marketing campaigns, provide personalized experiences and boost customer retention.

Daily data syncing means that your segments will always remain up-to-date. As customer behaviors change, so will your segments. Identifying key moments in the customer journey is now easier than ever, you’ll never miss an opportunity to convert customers again.

Creating eRFM segments

RFM modeling creates seven personas that can be made into audience segments:

1. Non-customers: potential customers who have subscribed to your newsletter but haven’t made a purchase.  
2. Inactive: customers who have not made a purchase in a long time.  
3. Need nurturing: customers who are about to fall into the ‘inactive’ segment. 
4. High value: customers who have spent a lot with you, but have not shopped recently. 
5. Recent: shoppers who have been actively purchasing from you. 
6. Loyal: customers who shop with you frequently.  
7. Champions: shoppers who frequently spend a lot of money with your brand.  

With the addition of engagement insights, these personas are broken down further into four categories: 

1. Lightly engaged  
2. Engaged 
3. Highly engaged 
4. Most engaged  

This gives you a total of 28 audience groups to choose from when building your segments.  

How to use eRFM segments

With 28 segments to build, the possibilities are endless. Each customer can receive highly personalized and relevant messages depending on the journey stage they’re on. 

Here are just a couple of ways you can add eRFM segments into your day-to-day marketing automation strategy.  

1. Greet new website visitors

Making a good first impression on new customers is essential for growth. A strong pipeline of potential customers can guarantee your business’s future revenue. With more consumers shopping online than ever before, you must identify those yet to make a purchase so you can target them accordingly.  

Traditional RFM modeling doesn’t account for prospective customers expressing interest in your brand. eRFM allows you to target new subscribers who are browsing your website for the first time. You can identify these non-customers and enroll them in welcome or nurture programs to highlight your brand’s USPs.  

2. Discover critical first purchase intent

We know that shoppers today browse multiple bands before they’re ready to make a purchase. Increased competition online means you’re fighting more and more for their attention.

Using eRFM modeling, online behaviors are tracked, so you can easily identify shoppers who look ready to convert for the first time. Applying this to segment builder means you can deliver relevant and timely content that will help tip them over the edge. This is the perfect time to send readers information about your shipping or returns policy. 

3. Re-engage inactive customers

Inactive customers can be a huge source of opportunity. They’ve previously purchased from you but for whatever reason, you just haven’t seen them in a while. Our eRFM model makes it easy for you to identify inactive customers who are showing signs of re-engaging with your brand.  

You can target this segment with a timely win-back campaign that reminds them of your brand’s values or offers them a discount code on their next purchase. This may be the incentive they need to come back into the fold. 

4. Identify customers with active carts

Customers add items to their baskets for many reasons, but one thing is for sure: they’re considering purchasing these products. Maximize these clear signs of intent by acting quickly to close the sale.  

When your eRFM model surfaces customers with an active cart, you should be retargeting these shoppers with personalized product recommendations or exclusive offers. Product recommendations are proven to increase average order value, so are crucial for customers at this stage in their journey.  

5. Drive repeat purchases from existing customers

Retaining existing customers is 5x cheaper than acquiring new ones. To really tap into brand-new revenue opportunities, eRFM can surface customers showing signs of making a second purchase.  

You can use this clear intent to purchase to highlight unique aspects of your customer experience, such as your loyalty program. Collecting points per purchase or unlocking special rewards can drive shoppers to return time and time again.  

6. Maintain loyal customer engagement

Your most loyal customers are typically very low maintenance. You’ve already done the hard work showing them why you should be their go-to brand. They trust you and because of that, they’re happy to be advocates for your brand. But what do you do when their engagement starts to wane? 

By creating a segment based on this eRFM persona, you can enroll these shoppers in a customer care automation program to keep engagement levels high. This is the perfect segment to target with requests to complete focus group surveys.

As well as maintaining engagement, you can create a stronger relationship because these customers will feel directly connected to your brand. 

Adding eRFM to your segmentation strategy

eRFM segments are based on customer behaviors. For those marketers out there struggling to implement an effective segmentation strategy because of poor customer data, eRFM is the solution you didn’t know you were waiting for.  

eRFM pulls in data hiding in plain sight. There’s no need for extensive data cleansing or laborious preference collection. We use insights from your ecommerce platform to help you discover opportunities waiting to be turned into revenue-generating moments.