Companies are using email now more than ever. They realize email is actually one of the more effective tools and it is a vital part of a holistic marketing strategy. And, the numbers are supporting it. One of the ways you can avoid email marketing mistakes is by creating better buyer personas.

According to Emarsys, 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel and 80% for customer retention. Email was consistently ranked as the single most effective way to generate awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention. The reality is that email delivers results we cannot ignore.

So, what is the biggest mistake with email? It’s a failure to create buyer personas. So, let’s explore the concept of buyer personas further.

What are Buyer Personas?

A buyer persona can be defined as a representation of your perfect customer. In order to have a successful email campaign, you should to start by creating buyer personas. To create a buyer persona you should be answering questions like these: 

• Who is your customer? 
• What are their needs or wants and motivations? 
• Can we determine some aspects of their personality? 
• What are their behaviors, attitudes, and journeys? 

To find many of these answers, let’s explore the importance and benefits of using a Marketing Automation platform.

Why is Marketing Automation Important?

Marketing Automation is important because it consolidates customer data from website visits, content request forms, social media, and email campaigns into one place. Through the information gathered from these customer activities, a marketing automation platform helps you build more targeted messages for email messages and to create a better understanding of your buyer.

Now, let’s look at five ways marketing automation platforms are misused – as it relates to email campaigns.

Lack of segmentation.

Buyer personas help to put prospects into groups; based on their similarities, tendencies, and differences. According to Campaign Monitor, “Marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue”. By creating buyer personas, it becomes easier to target potential customers with specific messages.

No integration with CRM.

Understanding your buyers better means gathering as much information about them as possible. When creating your buyer personas, another great resource is your CRM. CRMs gather account or sales related data.  Integrating your marketing automation platform with your CRM makes for more complete customer understanding. This will aid you in your email campaign creation and eventually help your sales team close sales faster.

Sending “unqualified” leads to sales. 

When you understand buyer personas, you are better able to put prospects and customers through email campaigns that will make them more sales-ready. If you don’t understand who your buyers are, your sales people will struggle to properly engage them or marketing may not know which email campaigns will be the best fit for them. 

Lacking the ability to score leads. 

Having well-defined buyer personas strengthens the lead scoring process. When you understand what your ideal customer looks like, you can nurture prospects with campaigns that will effectively increase their lead scores. More scoring options will give you the ability to target buyers better depending on where they are in the sales cycle.  

No personalization. 

Ultimately, you want to personalize the buying experience to the way your customers buy and personas are the connection to achieve this. Taking advantage of marketing automation data enables email marketing campaigns to be as personalized as possible.

Getting to Know Your Customers

There are many sources for gathering data when defining your “perfect” customers. These include social media interactions, website visits, webinar attendance, emails received, and marketing content read. Another great source of information is your front-line sales team. Getting their feedback and insight is critical. Here are some questions you might want to ask them:

• Who are you selling to?
• How do they like to be communicated with? 
• What questions are they asking? 
• What pains do they have? 

Lastly, and probably the greatest resource is your current customers. Contact them directly, send a personal email, or a short survey. After conducting all this research, you will get a better understanding of how to interact with buyers.  

One of the easiest ways to avoid email marketing mistakes is by creating better buyer personas. To learn more about how vablet can help CLICK HERE