Identifying Your Email Marketing Audience Fast and Efficiently – But How?
Quickly and accurately define the right audience for your email campaigns without expensive and complicated tools.
„Define your target group“: You will probably read this tip in any guide on email marketing strategy, email marketing concept or creating newsletter campaigns.
But you’re thinking: That’s way too time-consuming – I’ll just send my emails to my entire mailing list?
We invite you to learn more about the benefits of pragmatic targeting. And we promise you won’t have to buy expensive analysis tools or undergo lengthy training.
What to expect from this article:
- What is Target Group Identification in Email Marketing?
- Why is Defining Your Target Group Important?
- Is My Newsletter List My Audience – Or is My Audience My List?
- What Kind of Information Do You Need for Determining Your Target Group?
- 5 Simple But Effective Steps to Identify Your Target Audience
- Understand Your Target Group Better: More Simple Ways to Identify Your Audience
Let’s get started! Let’s get the terminology straight:
What is Target Group Identification in Email Marketing?
When it comes to email marketing, defining your target audience means figuring out who your offers and content are best suited for. This helps you write emails that meet the needs and interests of those recipients. It’s like buying a gift for someone whose preferences you know exactly.
Why is Defining Your Target Group Important?
Audience identification is important because it ensures that your emails reach the right recipients – your target audience. This is at the very heart of your email marketing efforts.
When you know who your target audience is, you can write emails that get right to the point – keyword relevant! This makes your emails more effective, saves you money and prevents your subscribers from viewing your emails as spam or unsubscribing. It is therefore important to target the right people for better results.
In short, targeting makes your email campaigns more effective.
Is My Newsletter List My Audience – Or is My Audience My List?
It can be both, but it doesn’t have to be. Your entire email list may be the right audience for your campaign, but it may only be relevant to some of your recipients. For example, if you have an online store, a discount campaign will be of interest to all recipients, but an outlet sale in your regional store will only be of interest to those who live in the relevant zip code area.
The success of your newsletter campaigns depends largely on knowing your recipients and their interests. Only then can you send them the right content and engage them in the right way. Otherwise, your offers and content will generate very little response – a frustrating result!
What Kind of Information Do You Need for Determining Your Target Group?
The basics of target group analysis include
- demographic details like age, gender, location and income as well as
- psychographic characteristics like interests and attitudes or
- Behavior and interactions of your subscribers in your emails.
The next step in email marketing targeting is the process of identifying who your recipients are and what interests them. Is the majority of them male or female? Do most of them live in the city or in rural areas? How old are they? What links have they clicked on in previous newsletters that indicate their interests?
These (and other) details form the basis of your target group analysis.
Don’t worry, we’ll show you how to find your email marketing audience quickly and accurately using simple methods. Everything you need is included in the basic features of our email marketing software. Here are some creative ideas for how you can use our tool to identify your target audience and some other easy tips:
5 Simple But Effective Steps to Identify Your Target Audience
Analyze and define your email marketing audience without having to dive into the depths of complex tools – here’s how to do it:
Step 1: Use the Subscriber Data You Already Have
Start with the obvious: your recipient data. Your recipient list already contains a lot of data that you can use to filter your recipients by audience. Your email marketing software stores information about your subscribers, such as their gender (if they have opted-in), interactions with your emails (opens and clicks), and registration information voluntarily provided to you, such as age or location. Use this data to get a clearer picture of your recipients and use segmentation to target them.
CleverReach offers you several options:
- Create up to 45 individual data fields in your recipient lists to fill with recipient data.
- You can also add “tags” to your recipients that contain more information about their user behavior.
The result is an (almost) infinite number of filtering possibilities, based on an ever-changing set of criteria.
Sounds helpful? That’s because it is! Give CleverReach a try:
Step 2: Use Open- and Click Rates and Tags
Open- and click rates are your friends: Our email marketing tool provides you with all these essential key figures in compliance with data privacy. Analyze them to find out which types of content work best for your recipients. Which of your emails got the most clicks and opens? These are topics your recipients are most interested in. From there, you can create audiences and send them relevant content and offers.
Get to know your subscribers even better by using tags. This happens by assigning keywords to your links. When one of your recipients clicks on one of these tagged links, their record is automatically tagged with this word. For example, are you a car dealership and offer cheap summer tires for different car brands? Then enter the car brand, “summer tires” and the tire type for each of your offers in your newsletter. Now you know which tire size is right for the subscriber and you can offer them winter tires.
Step 3: Ask Your Subscribers for Feedback
Your recipients are a valuable resource. Use the power of direct communication and send them a quick survey asking for feedback on your emails. Ask subscribers for their interests and preferences. The answers will help you make adjustments and ensure that your emails are more relevant to your audience.
In a 2017 survey, the following reasons were given for subscribing to a newsletter (Source: Statista):
Use this information as an inspiration for your email marketing campaigns and send out the right content to help you achieve your goals.
Step 4: Segment Your Email List
Segmenting your email list is an effective way to target your audience. Our email marketing software makes it easy to segment your subscribers.
To do this, you can divide your newsletter recipients into different groups based on the characteristics they share. For example, you can segment your recipients by demographics, customers by purchasing preferences, or non-customers by interests. This allows you to send customized emails tailored to the needs of each group.
Step 5: Monitor, Learn, and Continuously Optimize Your Audience Strategy
Identifying your audience is not a one-time task, but an ongoing process that requires constant adjustments. After all, email marketing is not a one-way street. What emails or topics get opened the most? What links do your recipients click on? This data gives you ongoing insight into your audience’s interests. Monitor the behavior of your email subscribers and adjust your strategy accordingly to ensure you reach your audience effectively. Let our software help you!
With these five pragmatic steps, you can easily define and better understand your audience. Best of all, you can get started right away!
Understand Your Target Group Better: More Simple Ways to Identify Your Audience
Want to analyze your audience in more detail, but still get by without expensive tools and time-consuming methods? Okay, let’s have a look at what other simple methods there are for target group identification. If we used to use only the on-board tools of our email marketing software, we are now also using the dinghy to keep us in the picture.
Social Media as a Source of Information
If you are active on social media, you can also do research on your target audience there. View the profiles of your followers and fans to learn more about their interests and preferences. You can also gain valuable insights by paying attention to the comments and interactions or discussions below your own social media posts.
You can also use artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT to summarize what people say: Collect comments from your followers and let AI use them to create a powerful summary of how you and your product or service are being received by your followers.
Competitive Analysis for Better Insights
Your competitors can also help you understand your audience. Subscribe to their newsletters and analyze their email marketing campaigns and targeting. What kind of emails do they send? Who do they send them to? This can give you an indication of typical audiences in your industry. It can also help you differentiate and find your own niche or how to get positioned.
A/B Testing for Fine-Tuning and Optimization
Defining your audience is an ongoing process, and it is important to periodically review your audience to ensure it is still relevant. A/B testing is a powerful tool for analyzing and refining your targetin strategy. Send two different versions of an email to a small group of your subscribers and analyze which type of content and messaging works best with your audience. Send the version of your newsletter that performed better to your remaining subscribers. That way, the content of your emails will always reflect changing preferences. This keeps your newsletter campaigns effective and delivers better results.
Website Analysis for More Detailed Insights
Alright, another tool now comes into play, but website owners usually have at least one to start with, usually Google Analytics. Understanding how people interact with your website and newsletters can provide valuable insight into their interests and needs. Analyze how your subscribers behave on your website. What pages do they visit most? Which products are they interested in? What do they put into their shopping carts? This behavioral data helps you create personalized email campaigns tailored to your audience’s interests.
AI Support for Additional Inspiration
Most people are familiar with ChatGPT as a chatbot that can be used to create blog posts, summaries, and other types of written content. CleverReach also allows you to use our AI Content Generator and get suggestions for your newsletter copy, subject liness or preheaders.
But this is only one possible use of ChatGPT. Artificial intelligence also does amazing things when it comes to audience analysis. Of course, it doesn’t do this alone; AI is only as good as the task. But ChatGPT spits out helpful suggestions even with a simple prompt like this:
The challenge is: “Create a target audience analysis for the marketing of logo printed floor mats”
And this is what ChatGPT gives us in response:
Target group analysis: Logo printed floor mats
Introduction
- Definition: What are logo printed floor mats?
- Benefits and advantages of logo mats
Primary target groups
- Businesses and stores
- Office building: for lobby branding
- Retail stores: to welcome customers and as an advertising medium
- Hotels and restaurants: creating a consistens brand image
- Educational Institutions
- Schools, universities, nursery schools: for identification and security
- Event agencies
- For special events, trade shows and exhibitions
- Sports clubs and stadiums
- For branding and building team spirit
Secondary target groups
- Private homes: for custom designs, such as family names or house numbers
- Freelancers and small businesses: helping home and small offices look professional
Target audience needs
- Brand presentation: creating a consistent and professional brand image
- Cleanness: protection against dirt and humidity, especially in high-traffic areas
- Individuality: ability to personalize and customize your design
- Quality: durable and high quality mats that stand up to daily use
Reasons for buying
- Aesthetics: attractive design and colors
- Functionality: slip resistant, easy to clean
- Price: Value for money
- Sustainability: eco-friendly materials and manufacturing processes
Target audience communication channels
- B2B platforms: for Enterprises and Large Accounts
- Social Media: especially for younger audiences and trendsetters
- Trade shows and exhibitions: direct contact with potential clients
- Local advertising: for local businesses and service providers
Conclusions and recommendations
- Diversify by offering different sizes, materials, and price points
- Customer feedback: gather customer reviews and opinions and incorporate them into product development
- Sustainability initiatives: offer eco-friendly options and recycling programs
Through a thorough target audience analysis, logo printed doormats can be effectively marketed by meeting the specific needs and desires of each target audience. It is important to consider both primary and secondary audiences and develop appropriate marketing strategies.
While we are not a manufacturer of logoed floor mats ourselves and cannot judge how well the AI identified potential target audiences, we found the AI’s suggestions to be extremely helpful and comprehensive.
Of course, ChatGPT does not know your audience better than you do, but AI insight from the outside often helps to discover untapped potential in targeting. Just give it a try!
Target Group Analysis is the Key to Success in Email Marketing
Defining your email marketing audience is critical to the success of your campaigns. The better you know and understand your audience, the more targeted and successful your email marketing efforts will be. Don’t forget: Relevance is king! After all, don’t you get tired of a newsletter that sends you offers for rabbit cages just because you once ordered cat food from the sender?
To summarize, we’ve shown you how you can quickly and easily identify who you want to email without having to rely on extensive tools. Send relevant and engaging emails to the right people with the resources built into our email marketing software.
- Use existing subscriber data,
- segment your email list,
- analyze key figures,
- search for information on social media and from your competitors and
- let artificial intelligence help you.
We hope this article on audience analysis with our CleverReach on-board tools has made you curious about how you can get more out of your email marketing. Did we even encourage you to develop more targeted campaigns? Then try our tips right away.
Remember that audience identification is an ongoing process that requires regular review and adjustment. With continuous optimization, you can ensure that your email campaigns become more effective and deliver significantly better results. Good luck!
Do you need professional help defining your target audience? Talk to an email marketing agency. The experts at an agency will use their expertise and resources to help you identify your target audience. They can also develop a customized strategy for you and provide many other services related to your email marketing.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please use our CleverReach Community to exchange ideas and get valuable email marketing tips from other users.