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Mike Lieberman, CEO and Chief Revenue ScientistThu, Jul 28, 2016 4 min read

How to Send the Right Email to the Right Person

{}Email marketing isn’t dead, no matter what misconceptions you might have heard. In fact, it’s still a thriving inbound marketing tool used by millions of brands. Why? Because it works.

People want your emails—that’s why they subscribe. You can easily reach them through email, considering 91% of consumers check their inboxes on a daily basis. Email marketing allows you to get personal—you can easily personalize your messages with the right software, adding your recipients’ names and even offering relevant product or content recommendations based on their preferences. Email marketing has a marketing ROI of a whopping 4,300%. Plus, it’s a cost-effective method of reaching out to your audiences and keeping them informed while generating leads along the way.

The thing is, though, many marketers make email marketing mistakes that reduce the effectiveness of their messages. If you want to produce the desired effects from your emails, you need to learn how to send the right email to the right person.

Let’s get started.

Determine Your Audience

To send the right email to the right person, it makes sense to first figure out who that person is. So to begin, you need to determine who your ideal customers are. You need to understand their interests, their pain points, as well as their behavioural patterns, their motivations, and their goals. Create separate buyer personas for each audience. The more you know about your audience, the better you can ensure that you’re sending them the right content.

Segment Your Contacts Database

You likely have several different types of audiences. So to send the right email to the right person, you need to segment your contact database primarily on the different buyer personas you’ve created when you determined your audience. Segmenting your contacts database essentially means you’re grouping recipients with similar goals, motivations, and pain points together, so you can send the most appropriate content to every group.

When you send emails to targeted lists, you’ll increase your open and click-through rates.

Send the Right Email at the Right Time

Your leads, prospects, and customers aren’t all going to be in the same stages of the buying cycle. Some will still be in the awareness stage, where they’ve just determined that they have a need and require a solution. Others will be in the consideration stage, where they’ll start comparing different products and different companies to consider buying from. And others still will be in the decision stage, where they’re just about ready to buy.

To send the right email, you must consider where your recipients are in the sales funnel. Each stage will require different types of content. The consideration stage, for example, should focus on content that explains what sets you apart from the competitors with FAQ sheets, product whitepapers, and third-party reviews, while the decision stage should focus on case studies and testimonials to seal the deal as well as estimates, quotes, product demos, and free trials. Sending a recipient content that’s irrelevant to the stage they’re currently in won’t be effective.

Nurture Your Lead into a Customer

Sending emails to your leads should move them down the sales funnel. With the right content at the right time, you’ll successfully be able to educate your leads while simultaneously building trust and credibility and creating top-of-mind awareness, so you can nurture your lead into a customer.

The Bottom Line? CATS

If all of this information is a lot to chew on, just remember the acronym CATS: The right content, the right audience, and the right timing equal success. This is what you need to remember in order to be successful at email marketing and send the right email to the right person at the right time.

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Mike Lieberman, CEO and Chief Revenue Scientist

Mike is the CEO and Chief Revenue Scientist at Square 2. He is passionate about helping people turn their ordinary businesses into businesses people talk about. For more than 25 years, Mike has been working hand-in-hand with CEOs and marketing and sales executives to help them create strategic revenue growth plans, compelling marketing strategies and remarkable sales processes that shorten the sales cycle and increase close rates.

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