How To Increase Email Profits By Giving Your Subscribers Exactly What They Want

by John McIntyre

Personalize Your Email Marketing

How many audiences do you effectively reach through email marketing?

Did you answer “just one?”

Well, I’m about to make a very compelling case that…

For 99.9% of business owners out there…

This mindset just might be holding back your email profits… big time.

Let me explain:

Pretend you’re a middle-aged man, who really likes to play golf.

You’re watching ESPN, when all of a sudden an advertisement grabs your attention…

It’s a brand-new Callaway driver, and it’s PERFECT for you.

You love the shape, the design… and they say it’ll improve your drives by a whopping 10 yards.

You simultaneously reach for your wallet and laptop, eager to make the purchase right away.

Until… you hear the dreaded words, “made specifically for beginners.”

Boom!

Instantly, you lose all interest in the product.

Why?

Because you don’t consider yourself a beginner.

And…

You no longer think the product was made specifically for you.

It’s illogical, but that’s just how humans think.

This same marketing blunder happens all the time in email.

Leaving thousands of potential sales on the table… never to be seen again.

Discover a step-by-step process to unleash all of your “hidden” profits:

One Business, One Customer?

To the average person: is a “beginner” golf club really any different?

No!

For all intents and purposes… it’s the same darn thing as an “expert” golf club.

But that’s not what the target customer thinks…

So Callaway has to sell golf clubs for children, for women, for men, for the elderly…

And almost any other golf-playing audience you could imagine.

So what’s the point of all this?

If you want maximum results: You need to personalize your marketing as much as possible. (Tweet This)

The good news?

It’s easy as heck to do this through email… once you set it up correctly.

And it leads to greatly increased response.

Getting Into The Nitty-Gritty

So how do you personalize your email campaigns?

It all starts with the customer:

Step 1) Figure Out The “Who”

How many different audiences are you really reaching?

There’s a few different ways you can approach this…

Here are a few possibilities to get you thinking:

  • Segment By Interest – Arrange your email campaigns around your subscribers’ various interests. This is ideal if your website/brand attracts multiple audiences that have almost entirely different desires. For instance, if you sell golf clubs direct to consumers, but also market your products to the owners of sporting goods stores… it’ll require two different email approaches.
  • Segment By Behavior – Track past purchases, clicks, and pageviews… and other actions to segment your audience by their behavior. This way, you can reach your most involved subscribers separately from any non-buyers. Can you say exclusive one-time offer to “preferred customers?” Similarly, now you can also send more appropriate marketing messages to each segment. (i.e. you probably want your emails to evolve as customers move further into your funnel.)
  • Segment By Choice – You can even allow subscribers to speak for themselves. One way to do this is a online questionnaire (let them choose a personalized email “journey” on the topics they want)… but you could also have different landing pages attach subscribers to different lists.

Keep in mind: You’ll probably want to stick to just a few of your most profitable “audiences”… so you don’t spread yourself too thin. Think of this as an “80/20” approach to segmenting your email list.

This is also a good time to figure out your least profitable audiences…

So you know who NOT to target in your marketing.

There’s no reason to waste money, time, and effort trying to influence people that just aren’t interested. (Tweet This)

And in a way…

It’s just as important to disqualify the wrong audiences as it is to attract the right ones.

Keep that strategy in mind during the next step as well:

Step 2) Get Personal & Rethink Your Marketing

Now it’s time to take another look at your email campaigns…

Remember, it doesn’t matter if you’re using autoresponders or doing one-time blasts.

With each of your separate audience segments, ask yourself:

  1. What are these specific subscribers interested in?
  2. What type of stories will resonate with them?
  3. On average, what kind relationship do I have with these subscribers?
  4. What’s the smartest marketing approach for reaching them?

Those are just some preliminary questions…

But they have BIG implications.

Depending on what segment you are reaching…

You should be “personalizing” the copy, the offer, the stories you use, the frequency of your sending, etc.

Why?

Because what works for one type of subscriber isn’t always going to work for the rest.

Now you have the ability to tweak your email marketing

And start talking to the portion of your audience that had previously “tuned you out.”

Keep in mind: Once you start splitting up your audience into different groups… you’ll need to test each group separately.

Because… you might end up finding that radically different marketing approaches work best for different segments.

So don’t be afraid to run creative and unlikely split-tests… who knows what you’ll find?

Getting Personal: The Big Implications

It’s worth repeating: When it comes to email marketing, there are almost zero businesses that have just a single audience.

And every time one of your marketing messages is sent out…

Unoptimized and unpersonalized…

You are only falling behind further and further.

What’s the big deal? Unhappy subscribers, lower sales numbers, and a significantly handicapped business.

On top of that, personalizing your email marketing doesn’t just boost your bottom line…

It affects almost every element of your marketing and business growth.

Think about this: For every lost subscriber, you aren’t just losing an opportunity to make a sale.

You’re losing the relationship.

And they’re cutting ties.

That means you lose any ability to influence them…

You can’t get them to read a blog post… respond to an offer… or even refer your business to a friend.

So clear out some free time to make sure you are doing email the right way…

Because it might just be the big marketing breakthrough you’ve been waiting for.

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