Email Marketing: Customer Personas

The questions your prospects need to answer when considering handing over their email addresses are, why should I care? What value do I get? What makes your email different? What type of content can I expect? How often will I receive emails? What details do I need to give? You absolutely need to lead with value and not value to you, but value to the person receiving the email. This is something that should be implemented throughout all of your marketing, but focusing on the topic of email marketing, you should be offering your subscribers, something of value and avoiding sending them salesy emails. But here’s the thing you can’t just offer any old freebie. It needs to matter to your target audience. To identify the most desirable freebie for your target audience, you’ll have to create and consult your target personas. You can then choose the giveaway that best solves your audiences core problems and caters to their core desires.

So what do I mean by a customer persona? Now I’m not gonna go too deep into this as honestly, we could do a whole webinar on that alone, but here’s the gist. A customer persona is just a semi fictional depiction of a real customer. Knowing your customer persona or personas as you may very well have more than one means you can align your emails with the type of info or content that they actually want to receive. Again, the big mistake I’ve seen over the years is clients sending out the information that they want the recipient to have typically a product or a service that they want to sell, sell, sell, and never stopping to think about what the person on the other end of the email actually wants and cares about. Look, it’s human nature to recoil when we feel we’re being sold to. Now, I’m not saying, Hey, you should never try to be selling you shouldn’t be out there selling far from that. What I am saying is lead with value. I’ve got an example coming up, but my rule of thumb would be for every email you send with the goal of making a sale, send about four that asks for nothing and offers real value to the recipient. In truth, If they interact with the value packed emails, then you’re actually selling, but in a far more subtle way.