Unopened emails? Low engagement? High bounce rates? Are your clients going cold on you? It might be time to revamp your email marketing personalization and spark a connection with subscribers.
In 2024, people expect personalized communication from businesses. And with thousands to pick from, people will opt for a company that offers that personal connection. They want more than just “Hello %FIRSTNAME%” at the top of your newsletter, too!
Think personalized messages with targeted suggestions triggered by their interactions with your company.
Think behavioral marketing.
Remote work and global collaboration are very much the norm these days, and getting the hang of asynchronous communication is key to making these situations work. It’s what helps us connect with each other in a more personal way, allowing us to build genuine long-term relationships with prospects.
While emails are often sent and received asynchronously, understanding how contacts engage with emails and tailoring messages based on their behavior constitutes a form of asynchronous communication within the realm of email marketing.
Email marketing has always been the cornerstone of building strong client relations. Personalization has long been a pivotal part of email marketing. Now, behavioral marketing is the latest trend for maximizing the power of analytics in email marketing and capitalizing on the potential of personalization.
In this blog, we’ll run through all you need to know to give your personalized email marketing campaigns a rocket-fueled boost with behavioral marketing. We’ll explain what it is, its benefits, and how, using automated tools like rasa.io, you can easily incorporate behavioral marketing into your email strategy.
What is Behavioral Marketing?
In the context of email marketing, behavioral marketing, or behavioral email targeting, is an approach that focuses on understanding subscribers’ behavior so you can personalize their experience with your business. You use email subscribers’ interactions with your company to identify behavior patterns and use these so you can speak to them on their level. Simple.
By gathering data from social media, websites, and email, you can gain insight into demographic data, purchase behavior, and lead engagement. This granular data can be used to segment email subscribers into more accurate profiles of potential prospects and existing clients.
Then, leveraging this information, you can create outreach emails or newsletters with personalized content that anticipates the wants and needs of individual email subscribers. It also allows you to set up automated trigger emails.
Example: For instance, if a domain provider tracked website interactions, they may identify decision-makers searching for information about top-level domains without completing a purchase.
The company could send those users content, such as a blog post, clarifying the differences between top-level domains like .com, .net, .biz, .ai, and .io. You could even include a special offer to help seal the deal. Helping them solve a need specific to their recent activity helps them make a decision and can guide your leads through your funnel to conversion.
Why Behavioral Marketing is Key to Effective Personalization
The personalized experience you can provide subscribers with behaviorally targeted marketing is unmatched. You increase customer convenience by offering services related to their business’ industry, type, size, and needs. You can also foster a genuine connection by responding to prospects’ interest in working with your brand and creating a dialogue.
This approach to personalization hugely enhances the engagement experience for decision-makers, increases conversion rates, and significantly boosts loyalty. As a result, it improves your ROI on marketing efforts in the short and long term.
Interestingly, despite behavioral email targeting being the future of personalized marketing, few have embraced it.
Surprisingly, there are still some email marketers out there asking ‘What is a trigger email?’
So, by reading this blog, you’re already a step ahead of the curve.
Here are a few more ways behavioral marketing can improve the personalization of your email marketing:
- Improves the user experience by giving you the best understanding of your clients’ needs, it helps you ensure emails are relevant and useful to each subscriber.
- Eases the buyer’s journey by recognizing where along the funnel your email subscriber is, you can better guide them toward conversion.
- Increases loyalty as the behavioral email targeting is a fantastic way to build a connection with existing B2B clients and potential ones. That means it’s a good way of keeping them loyal too.
- Increases engagement as it not only will it keep clients around, but it will help you get more out of them too. Email subscribers are more likely to open and click through your newsletters and outreach emails if they are behaviorally triggered.
- Boosts conversions especially if you don’t want your calls to action to fall on deaf ears, target interested prospects. Behavioral marketing is a fantastic way to do this.
- Increases ROI by boosting conversion rates. After all, the goal of any marketing strategy is to increase the bottom line and behavioral marketing can increase your ROI dramatically.
Key Data Points to Track
Email engagement data
The bread and butter of an email marketer, metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and email preferences change continuously.
You should look for both highly engaged and disengaged subscribers and study their behavioral patterns. This will show you how effective your email campaigns are. You can use this information to assess the performance of subject lines, content, and timing within each segmentation.
If certain segments always open emails related to a specific topic, send them more. If a certain segment never opens the same emails, personalize them for that segment or send less. Also, collecting information from unsubscribers helps you develop client win-back strategies.
“As someone who values efficiency and meaningful engagement, I know firsthand how overwhelming it can be to manage and segment contacts manually. That’s why I’m passionate about solutions like rasa.io. Automating the segmentation process based on topical data isn’t just a time-saver; it’s a game-changer. It allows you to deliver content that truly resonates with your audience, transforming your lead nurturing strategy into something that’s both impactful and personalized”
– Erica Salm Rench, COO of rasa.io
Simplify Creating Engaging Personalized Emails!
Use smart technology to save you time curating so you can focus on the “bajillion” other things you need to do.
In addition to tracking email engagement metrics, it’s important to ensure that all contact information for email subscribers is up-to-date and accurate. This way, you can follow up with interested email leads as part of your outbound sales efforts.
Use tools such as website forms or surveys, social media sites like LinkedIn, and online phone search platforms to make sure you have the right details for key decision-makers. This data can then be fed into your CRM software, so you can manage and nurture these customer relationships over time.
Regularly updating and verifying contact information can help improve email deliverability and ensure that your campaigns effectively reach the right audience.
Tip: When dealing with sensitive subscriber data, such as contact information, it’s crucial to ensure legal compliance and protection. Utilizing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) template can help safeguard your subscribers’ information and mitigate risks associated with data breaches or misuse.
Purchase and Conversion History
For B2B companies that sell products or services, analyzing purchase or other conversion behavior of email contacts can help you make valuable decisions about each clients’ future needs.
What services have they purchased in the past? Have they recently downloaded your most recent catalog? What new services do you have now that might be relevant? What additional solutions can you target them with to enhance the results of existing products?
Tracking clients’ history means you can segment email lists based on past conversion points and send targeted promotions or product recommendations.
For instance, if you sell video conferencing solutions, an enterprise client might have previously purchased a suite of screens and cameras from you. If your company launches a new sound bar or touch-pad controller, you might offer an exclusive discount on these products, sending key accounts targeted emails to encourage a new purchase.
Many B2C companies track purchase behavior data with great success for lead generation on e-commerce platforms or CRMs. This is an equally valuable activity in business-to-business selling as clients’ purchasing patterns with previous emails are a great indicator of buying intent.
Website Activity
Website activity data involves all the actions taken by visitors on a company’s website, such as pages viewed, solutions browsed, questions asked, case studies downloaded, or forms filled out. This data offers a deeper understanding of how subscribers view your business. It tells you their interests, intent, and engagement level.
You can use website activity to identify high-intent leads and convert those leads by triggering automated email campaigns.
In our earlier example, if a visitor to a domain provider’s website visits your support hub or community page asking, ‘What are .ai domains good for?’, you can use this opportunity to explain why more businesses in the tech industry are using this domain and offer support in helping them register one for their company.
Demographic data
Demographic data includes information such as a company’s size, industry, location, budget, and structure, as well as purchase history and tech stack. It can also include data on an individual buyer’s job role and information such as gender and educational background.
In most cases, demographic profiles are used for basic segmentation and personalization. For example, demographic profiles could be used to avoid sending emails about inventory management software to a SaaS company or .sa domain names to a company based in South Africa.
However, with behavioral marketing, you can take it further by gathering more information on the likes and preferences of each contact segment. Then, an email campaign targeting tech start-ups might feature vibrant visuals and trendy language, while a campaign targeting a government entity might be more serious and professional.
Social media engagement
Using a social media engagement analytics tool like Keyhole or Sprout Social provides key insights into buyer preferences, interests, and, most of all, brand sentiment. It’s a fantastic way to see what specific elements of your branding resonate most with your prospects and each segment.
Personalizing email content so it responds to a company’s social media activity and promoting relevant offers or events is an incredible strategy for nurturing relationships with clients. For example, a client who frequently engages with posts related to a specific service, like educational events, might receive targeted emails about upcoming webinars or how to host a bespoke program.
Social media engagement data can be tracked using social media analytics tools. These too can be integrated with marketing automation platforms for seamless cross-channel targeting and communication.
How to personalize email campaigns with behavioral marketing
Gather data and segment your audience
Begin by collecting data points regarding clients’ behaviors and preferences.
This should include all the data points we’ve listed above. Segmentation can be based on whichever individual criteria you choose, but the more granular and comprehensive your data is, the more you can do with it.
You can use data analytics tools and CRM systems to organize and segment this data effectively. With AI automation tools like rasa.io, you can do it quicker, easier, and to a higher level, collecting more granular data with less time and effort. This is one of the top ways AI impacts your customer experience.
How to personalize email campaigns with behavioral marketing
Gather data and segment your audience
Begin by collecting data points regarding clients’ behaviors and preferences.
This should include all the data points we’ve listed above. Segmentation can be based on whichever individual criteria you choose, but the more granular and comprehensive your data is, the more you can do with it.
You can use data analytics tools and CRM systems to organize and segment this data effectively. With AI automation tools like rasa.io, you can do it quicker, easier, and to a higher level, collecting more granular data with less time and effort. This is one of the top ways AI impacts your customer experience.
Tailor content for each segment’s interests and behaviors
Once you’ve segmented your audience, it’s time to develop targeted, highly personalized content for each group.
This means email subject lines, copy, and visuals should all be tailored to resonate specifically with each segment’s preferences and past interactions. There are endless variables to experiment with, from the way you sign off on emails to choosing the right newsletter image size.
Start by tailoring specific content and offers for each segment of your client base. So, if certain solutions or services resonate with your SMB audience, include content relating to them in your next newsletter. The next step is to start fine-tuning the details, personalizing visuals for certain sectors and budgets and tweaking subject lines based on social media engagement.
Utilizing behavioral marketing techniques, you can also customize newsletter email templates to cater to the specific interests and behaviors of each segment, maximizing engagement and conversion rates.
Set up triggered emails based on specific actions
A trigger email is an email sent to a subscriber automatically based on specific actions or behaviors they have taken. These triggers can include actions such as viewing your pricing plans, scheduling a demo, visiting a particular feature/solutions page multiple times, or opening/clicking on previous emails.
By setting up triggered emails, you can deliver timely and relevant messages to hot leads, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion. More than this, once these triggers are set, your emails will be entirely automated. So, you can offer buyers a more personalized experience and move them through the sales funnel without any input.
Suggest related solutions based on purchase history
The next step is to start analyzing the data collected from clients’ purchase history for insights into what they might need next.
Analyze past purchase patterns to identify related or complementary solutions likely to appeal to each company and give them personalized offers and recommendations. You can then leverage the wealth of data collected from each account’s purchase history to provide general insights into customer segments.
Consider things such as how long ago a client purchased your product or solution. Has their company grown since then, or are they planning a significant expansion? If so, why not send targeted campaigns around solutions that can scale with them?
You might also try to upsell a newer version of a previously purchased product, whether it’s a SaaS product or a physical item used in manufacturing.
Time emails for optimal subscriber engagement
It’s easy to overlook, but the timing of your emails makes a huge difference. With behavioral targeting methods, you can divine fantastic insights into the preferences of each segment of your client base.
Utilize data analytics to identify peak engagement times for each audience segment and schedule your emails accordingly. Factors such as time zone differences, industry-specific trends, demographics, and individual buyer behavior should all be considered.
It’ll take some trial and error to find the right timings for each segment, so keep experimenting with different send times and analyze the performance metrics to refine your strategy.
Test different variations of your emails
We shouldn’t have to tell you this but, as with any marketing strategy, implement rigorous testing to optimize your campaigns over time.
Conduct A/B tests on subject lines, copy, imagery, CTAs, and overall layout. Use insights from these tests to identify the most effective variations and tweak your strategy accordingly.
Email marketing is a process of continuous improvement. This approach primarily means your email marketing is always getting better. Moreover, it allows you to maintain relevance with your always-changing audience and ever-evolving marketing trends.
Conclusion
Looking to the future, it’s clear behavioral email targeting will continue to play a crucial role in email marketing strategies. With advancements in AI technology and marketing automation tools, the possibilities for personalization are endless. By embracing these tools and techniques, email marketers can stay ahead of the curve and deliver exceptional experiences for clients while improving lead conversions and loyalty.
For those looking to take their email marketing to the next level, we encourage you to explore AI marketing automation tools like rasa.io. With features designed for data collection, segmentation, and campaign execution, these tools empower marketers to harness the full potential of behavioral marketing.
