Understanding your audience

It’s important for businesses using email marketing to understand that their goal shouldn’t be just to send their emails to everyone they ever “met” and whenever they wish. 

Emails that are sent to the wrong people create poor open and bounce rates. In addition to this, you will have to think about how your ROI will be impacted. 

Do you think that every member that visits your website can receive your next campaign? 

Wrong!

Since many of you are fans of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon consider that the following easter – eggs, are in fact Daenerys Dragon eggs, when it comes to “Understanding your audience”.

Green Egg – Subscription sources

Before importing your list and pressing the (my precious) send button, you need to make sure that your subscription sources are safe!

Make sure that your forms are not under a bot attack. A subscription form or your website can be under a bot attack even right now. 

A spambot is a malicious program designed to gather and use email addresses and information from online sources like forums, chat rooms, and websites. This information is usually collected in order to build lists for sending an unsolicited email – spam.

The same mechanisms can be used to attack your forms and add dozens of fake or real email addresses that the owner of the email doesn’t have a clue that he just subscribed to. 

In order to keep your forms secure, you will have to make sure that your forms are supported by ReCaptcha v2 or v3 or/and that you set up other mechanisms, that usually work like traps to make them more secure.

Captchas can come in multiple forms like solving distorted letters and numbers or checking pictures of a certain object.

Please check the example below:

New registrations that fail to answer correctly, won’t be a part of the list, since any other answer will simply exclude them from receiving messages.

Black Egg – Double opt-in 

A double opt-in process for a new registered email address is one effective way to determine if a user is indeed a human or not. 

When you select a double opt-in procedure for your email list, your recipients will need to verify their subscription through a confirmation email, right after subscribing. This will minimize the possibility of having invalid addresses on your email list since double opt-in lists have fewer bounces and unsubscribes, as well as more opens and clicks!

The person can then go to their email address to check and confirm it. It can authenticate if the email used to sign up is real and so is the person signing up.

Bots are likely to skip this step, so they are filtered from the get-go. 

Gold Egg – Learn your audience.

What do they like, which products do they click on, and when is the best time/day to send your next campaign? Are all of your members from the same country? Do your customers purchase through the email campaigns you are sending? Do you have non-engaged members? Do you have recipients that mark campaigns as spam/unwanted? Did you think of your I-AM-USING-MOBILE-24/7 recipients when you designed your campaign? Do you collect enough information about your recipients so that you can send them targeted campaigns? 

Those and 100 more questions should be answered to learn your recipients.  Either through your subscription form or through the user’s profile you can collect details like their location, their interests, or even how often they wish to receive news from you and what type of news, which is another information that you can find useful. So instead of sending two-three campaigns every day to your entire list, you can start by sending more targeted campaigns, and that means more profit for your brand.

Collecting their birthdays is another useful piece of information.

Consider yourself for a while and what you wish to happen every year on your birthday. You wish the people that care about you, to celebrate your birthday and it’s a good reminder to celebrate with you that you are an important person in their lives. You like gifts! Who doesn’t!? You like cakes! Even if you are a vegan, there are plenty of options! It’s an important day for you!

Receiving birthday cards and wishes via email is another thing that would definitely make your day as well. 

And what if that text you just added contains a personalized text?

Even if you don’t like birthdays, you can even celebrate the anniversary of their registration day!

Except that personalization tags drive engagements, they also increase your open rates. Based on our research, it seems that newsletters that use a personalization tag as a part of the subject line can increase the open rate by 21%. Why? Because it means that you know your audience! And you care about them!

Another method to collect more details from your members is when they complete an order. Instead of cutting all paths of communication with a member who ordered something from your brand, you can ask them if they were happy with the product they received and if they wish to learn more about similar products in the future. 

Do you wish for more?

Create dynamic content for your regular campaigns as well!

“Dynamic” means that the content inside your newsletter will change depending on who is receiving the campaign, based on the latest information you have gathered on the recipient such as their name, age, location, or any other data that you have deemed useful enough to collect and use inside your campaigns.

And what about the mobile version of your newsletter? 

When more than 60% of consumers are checking their mobile either to view messages or interact with it or purchase gifts, products, and services, then you definitely need to pay attention to small, mobile details.

All of our drag-and-drop templates are responsive by default. This means the images, text, buttons, footer, etc adjust to fit the screen it’s viewed on. 

Be in your recipients’ shoes. It’s vital to keep subscribers engaged in order to build a healthy relationship with your business. 

Segmentation is your new friend. Use it wisely!

Have second thoughts that learning your audience won’t bring you the desired results? 

Easter egg – Clean up your List!