How To Use Customer Behavior Data For Targeted Email Marketing

With 99% of consumers checking their emails every day and a massive 73% of millennials preferring to communicate with businesses through email, leveraging email marketing the right way can work wonders for your brand.

This is where targeted email marketing can come in handy. It helps you connect and communicate with the right customers at the right time.

Do you know 57% of consumers break up with a brand because of excessive spamming?

So, you see how critical it is to use targeted email marketing to reach the right people? It would help you in sending content that’s relevant and resonates with your subscriber base.

Simply put, targeted email marketing allows you to:

• Reach out to your customers without the risk of churning
• Enhance the probability of repeat purchase
• Communicate with the prospective subscribers at the end of your buying cycle

1. Characteristics of targeted email marketing

Here’s a broader look at various features of targeted email marketing:

a. Time management

Time management is a critical character in targeted marketing. For instance, a customer who purchased a 30-day usable product will receive a reminder email after 21 days of purchase to reorder.

If they don’t order in a few weeks, they will be enticed by a discount. See this HTML email template example from Fullscript, which reminds its customer to refill his medicine that he ordered four weeks ago.

Source: Good Emails

b. Relevant content

Relevancy is a superb feature of targeted emails. Targeted emails are based on the consumer’s characteristics, the action was taken recently, and their previous purchase history along with their overall behavior.

Therefore, when the customer receives your email, they find it relevant, which resonates with their taste and interest.

See how Crate&Barrel makes good use of the recent purchase history of its consumer and recommends them similar products of interest.

Source: Good Emails

c. Personalized approach

According to Statista, personalized emails have an open rate of 188% as compared to 12.1% without personalization.

This depicts how effective personalization can be. That’s the reason targeted emails leverage it to the core.

Apart from the first name, it makes use of criteria such as recent behavior or activity, last purchase activity, interests, location, account, or customer status for carrying out its personalization strategy.

Please take a look at Uniqlo’s personalized approach in its email template design, where it informs its customer about a price drop in a product they liked. Now, that’s how you leverage the browsing history of customers like a pro.

Source: Good Emails

2.  Advantages of targeted email marketing

Targeted email marketing is very different from the essential email marketing. It can help you attain things that no standard email blasts can. Here’s a quick look at few of its advantages:

a. Accelerates click-through and open rates

As mentioned already, targeted email marketing takes the route of personalization and relevancy to cater to customers. So, it naturally increases the click-through and open rates of emails.

b. Reduces unsubscribes

Since people only receive emails that resonate with them and that too in limited numbers, it considerably decreases the unsubscribe rates of targeted email campaigns.

c. Enhances revenue

Targeted emails take into account the behavioral pattern of customers. This, in turn, allows email marketers to send tailored and customized promotions to their subscriber base. As a result, it will enable them to close more deals and boost their revenue.

d. Increases customer lifetime value

Sending relevant emails to your target base at the right time and with the right content can build a trustworthy relationship with your customer base, thereby increasing their lifetime value.

e. Decreases churn

Targeted emails also play a significant role in decreasing the churn rate of your email campaign. From enticing customers to stay with your brand to bring back the customers who abandoned their cart, it helps you do it all.

Take some inspiration from Rudy’s, which made use of a quirky cart abandonment email to entice the customer to complete the purchase.

Source: Good Emails

3. Ways to use customer behavior data for targeted email marketing

Now, since you know everything about targeted email marketing, let’s find out how customer behavior data can help you carry your targeted campaign seamlessly.

a. Keeping a check on purchasing behavior

Purchasing behavior analyzes the activity of consumers throughout their decision-making process. It helps email marketers by giving a clear idea about:

• How is the customer approaching the purchase decision?
• What is the role of the customer in the purchasing process?
• What are the barriers that come in the way of purchase?
• What kind of behavior are the most and least predictive of making a purchase?

By understanding these criteria, you can create a relevant strategy to market your products and services to your customer base.

b. Analyzing various stages of a buyer’s journey

Targeted marketing, following the customer’s journey stage, helps you keep the communication and personalization in sync.

This increases the probability of conversion at every step. It also enables you to get an insight on stages where there is no customer progress so that you can enhance your marketing efforts there.

c. Getting hold of the usage pattern of customers

This criterion serves as a robust predictive indicator of the customer’s loyalty towards your brand. It keeps a check on:

• How are customers making use of your products and services?
• How frequently do they use it?
• How much time do they invest in it?
• What are the features they use?
• What is the number of users from the same account who use it?

Targeting customers based on usage helps marketers understand why some customers are regular buyers of their brand and why some aren’t.

It encourages them to analyze different marketing initiatives to increase the usage of ‘more usage customers’ while attracting the potential ‘heavy usage customers.’

d. Segmenting based on occasion and timing

Such targeting refers to both universal and personal occasions.

a. Universal occasions

It includes holidays, seasonal events, etc. and depicts purchasing patterns that apply to a particular customer base in specific demography.

b. Personal occasions

It depicts the purchasing pattern that repeats on a consistent level over a certain period based on their personal life.

It includes occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, regular monthly purchases, etc. You can do it the way Bark Box does with its birthday email template.

Source: Good Emails

4. Wrap up

All in all, behavioral data gives email marketers a better understanding and insight into their target customers.

It helps you know your customer base better, thereby providing a personalized value proposition to your customers.

As a result, it encourages your customers to purchase from your brand while accelerating your sales and profits.

So, if you want to make the most of your email marketing campaign, make way for targeted marketing and extract customer behavioral data from the core.

An email marketing team that comprises an expert html email developer, campaign manager, and automation expert can help you create super-targeted, impressive campaigns that generate massive sales for your business!