Be customer-centric to maximise your email marketing opportunities

“Welcome to the age of customer-centric marketing that centres on the value and business impact that a brand brings to the consumer,” Reeves says. Here are her five tips that can help marketers shift towards a customer-centric approach in their emails:

Know your audience
Do market research and competitor analysis so you can understand the customer personally and put yourself in their shoes. Once you have this information, you can create buyer personas to help you develop personalised email content for different segments of your audience.

Get smart about collecting data
Your chances of getting someone to complete a subscription form go down with every form field you add. So use a short form that only asks for the information that you actually need – such as email address and first name.

Once the person has subscribed, there are two ways to gather more data: by asking them via a survey or update-profile campaign, or by tracking their email engagement and behaviour. Examples of the latter include seeing which emails are opened most, and which links get clicked.

Test different content strategies
Email marketing is still the most-used channel for interactions between people and companies. But there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to email content. Instead, test and find what appeals to your specific audience. Stay committed to adding value and A/B test things like subject lines, images and calls-to-action to see what gets the most impact.

Customise your content at scale
Automation and customer journeys enable you to use subscriber data not just to customise individual messages, but the entire email experience – automatically. For instance, you can set up parameters for personalisation in a bulk-communication platform like Everlytic and automate personalisation in real-time on every email sent.

You can also create message workflows, customising things like sending dates and times, delays between messages, and conditions for sending based on personal data or customer engagement and behaviour.

Be self-aware and agile
This is your degree of openness to adapt and receive new information, because what works now can change at any time. Assume there’s always more to learn.

Another common pitfall to look out for is knowing the difference between being content-centric and customer-centric. Content-centricity focuses on generating and distributing content – a process so many marketers can fall into. Customer-centricity, on the other hand, keeps the customer continuously at the centre of our view: who are they, what channels are they on, what are they interested in? Only from this point do we create content for those touchpoints; content generation and distribution comes last.