How to Easily Create Targeted Email Marketing Lists

Email marketing is great, but personalized email marketing takes it to the next level by offering subscribers information relevant to their interests and needs. The best way to personalize your email marketing? Targeted email marketing lists!

In this post, we’re going to cover everything: what exactly personalized, targeted email marketing is; what the benefits are; how to create targeted email marketing lists; how to use them; and anything else you may need to know.

Let’s jump in!

What is personalized, targeted email marketing

Personalized and targeted email marketing is what takes email marketing to the next level. Instead of sending blast messages to your entire list, targeted email marketing allows you to send the right message to the right person at the right time based on the information you deem important (location, behavior, interests, etc.).

The level of personalization and targeting can range from simple (including a first name in your email greeting) to advanced (tailoring the email content based on the reader’s profile). An important thing to remember about targeted email marketing is that the difference between it and regular email marketing is that the personalization makes the email relevant to the reader and thus increases the likelihood they will open the email. When done right, personalized, targeted emails seem less like a marketing or sales pitch and more like an email from a real person or friend.

Targeted email marketing allows you to better appeal to your subscribers on an individual level; it helps you build a stronger relationship with them, which increases brand loyalty.

Think about it: are you more likely to engage with an email tailored to you or a blast message that doesn’t appeal to you at all?

Being able to segment your contacts into targeted email marketing lists means you can personalize these communications based on shared criteria.

Need proof? Almost three quarters of marketers say personalization increases overall customer engagement. Also, the transaction rates for personalized emails are six times higher than those that aren’t personalized.

How to create targeted email marketing lists

In order to be able to send targeted email marketing campaigns you first need targeted email marketing lists. It may be tempting to buy an email marketing list but please do not do this! Before you can send to an email address, you must have consent.

Besides the fact that you can face severe consequences for sending to purchased lists, the people you’re going to be sending to aren’t going to be as engaged as you’d like. After all, they would never have expressed interest in your organization so even if they don’t necessarily report your email they certainly won’t be engaged.

So, now that we’ve established that you’re not going to go buy a list and instead collect an engaged list of emails the good ol’ fashion way — here’s how.

1. Decide on the information you need

Before you start collecting information, you need to know what information is important to collect. For example, if you run a pet store the information you need will vary drastically from if you owned a law firm. So, take a moment to think about your ideal customer and what you need to know about them so as to properly target your email content.

There’s some information that will be universal:

Name
Email
Age
Gender
Location

The rest depends on your organization. Returning to the pet store example, in that case you may also want to know:

Type of pet (cat, dog, fish)
Breed of pet (pit bull, golden retriever, black lab)
Age of pet
Pet food sensitivities

If you didn’t collect this information and instead sent a blast email to all your customers about a dog food sale, well that would only interest a fraction of them and the others would be disengaged. Knowing this information helps frame your targeted email marketing campaigns.

2. Collect information from various sources

Next, now that you know what information you need to collect you have to decide how. Chances are you have several locations and opportunities to gather contact information: a contact form on your website, surveys to your existing contact lists to gather additional information, or asking while they’re still in your store. Just remember that whenever you’re asking for information, make it easy for your audience to give it to you.

3. Separate the information accordingly

So, now you know what information you want and you are starting to collect it. The next step is to segment it into the targeted email marketing lists. The segmentation of the information depends on the content you want to share with your audience. In fact, some contacts may end up on more than one list depending on how far you want to target your communications.

How to use targeted email marketing lists

Once you have your lists, it’s important that you use them properly in order to leverage them to their fullest extent. This includes writing the right content, which appeals to the individuals on each list. You can do this with proper buyer personas.

Create a buyer persona

With your lists in place, you have to think of the type of person — buyer persona — you’re writing for on each targeted email list. It may even be a good idea to write down a buyer persona for each list, which would essentially be a representation of all the contacts on the list.

Here’s an example of a buyer persona for one of the lists for a pet store.

targeted email marketing lists

With a buyer persona in place, you’ll always know how to target the content of your message to appeal to the contacts on that specific list. This means the next step is to create custom email content for the contacts on each list.

When writing, pretend you are writing to the buyer persona and keep these questions in mind:

What can I offer them?
What would interest them?
Do they need help?

Create and design your email

Second to great email content is great email design. A plain-text email wouldn’t be as engaging for readers as a branded email with relevant images and CTA buttons. In order to do this, you may want to consider using software for email marketing. The right solution will allow you to easily create well-designed emails while also providing tracking, reporting, and analytics.

Ready to use targeted email marketing lists?

If you’re ready to take the next step to provide engaging email campaigns for your subscribers, SimplyCast will be able to help! Not only does the SimplyCast platform include a comprehensive email editor, but our team of experts is also a source of knowledge and ready to help you today!