A few years ago marketers realised that sending 100’s of letters to potential customers was costing a lot of money. The revolution came with people writing an email instead of a letter and just emailing it to 1000’s of their subscribers. Blast emailing was born.

The problem was that people do not like receiving random and unpersonalised emails. This meant that hundreds if not thousands of people unsubscribed from mailing lists. People want personal and relevant information in a way that doesn’t intrude.

So what can you do?
Standard messages aren’t engaging with customers. We need to get away from the idea of blast emailing and think about having a discussion or conversation with our customers. Engaging means listening to customers and responding to requests. It also means adapting the discussion to suit their needs.

We don’t want to treat everybody the same, it’s not personal. But we should already have some information about customers and potential buyers. It starts with relevant content people want to read. We should then know who engages with the email by using open and click tracking.

Once we know who engages with which emails we know something more about them. We can start compiling a database of information about what people relate to. We can then use this information to filter subsections of customers by their interests.

Lets say we know that 30% of our recipients read more about a new product we just released. We can then send them a more personalised email with product information, development and ideas. This should be more in tune with their interests than the original emails’ content. Now, depending on their opens and clicks we know even more about them than we did before.

The last major question is how to achieve this in the real world? There are large and complicated CRM systems that can do this for us (or at least help manage it). But it depends completely on what our goals are, how big our businesses are and how huge the email lists are. We can even try creating a spreadsheet with customer details, likes and dislikes.

Either way, you will need to consider who you are aiming your emails at each time you send them. It may be best to write content for each of the documented likes. Then we can filter our list to create small groups of like-minded customers to write to. Once we have the filtered list we can add only the content relating to them.

The result is many emails sent to a few people who have a higher chance of liking and engaging with the content and your business.