Behavioral Based Email Targeting: Are You Using It?

How far do you want to go with your email marketing?

Now don’t just answer quickly and move on, because this is an important question to think about. Your email marketing campaign is (should) be a huge part of your digital marketing plan. But how big, or how much of an impact, do you want it to have on your overall marketing plan?

The easy route is to slap together some generic emails and send them to your entire email list. Now that might work, but chances are, it won’t resonate with everyone. So why does one email get clicks and responses from person A, while person B doesn’t pay much attention to it at all?

It has to do with where those particular consumers are in your buy cycle. So you send this email to your entire list. Person A is at the beginning of your buy cycle where they are just getting to know your brand and what you have to offer, while person B has worked their way down your marketing funnel and have become well aware of your brand and products.

Let’s say the email you sent out was a newsletter about your brand. Person A was interested and clicked on links because they wanted to know more about your brand. However, person B is already well aware of your brand and has downloaded several resources, therefore they showed no interest in your email.

This is what we call behavior based email marketing, and it goes back to the question I asked from the start. How far do you want to go with your email marketing?

Again, the easy route is to send the same emails to your entire list. However, if you want to lead person B further down the marketing funnel and create a conversion, you need to send them emails that are created based on their behavior with your brand.

When we say behavior, we mean what actions they have taken with your content — signed in, viewed certain products, filled a shopping cart, downloaded a whitepaper, etc. By taking these actions into consideration, you can then create emails that truly matter to each individual based on their position in your marketing funnel.

Statistics show that behavior based emails have an average open rate of 50%, while generic emails like weekly newsletters have an open rate of around 20%.

So email marketing can be a big player in your digital marketing plan, but how big of a player you want it to be depends on how much extra work you want to put into it. You can go the easy route and create generic emails and send them out weekly or monthly and get results. But if you want to get the best possible ROI out of your email marketing plan, we suggest having a good mixture of both generic emails and behavior based emails in order to create engaging, relevant content for your email recipients.

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