The industry of e-commerce is on rise, according to Statista ecommerce sales worldwide amounted to 2.3 trillion US dollars and e-retail revenues are projected to grow to 4.88 trillion US dollars in 2022. We can also tell this trend from the e-commerce email marketing agency I worked on where in under 5 years, we passed from a couple of freelance projects, to now a client base of over 75 ecommerce clients across 5 continents. This indicates a higher number of clients expecting to deliver the right message to the right people, here it is where the need to find a target audience appears.
The foundation of a well done marketing strategy is mainly composed of identifying a target audience, understanding who your ideal clients are, who are your competitors and acknowledging your product or service is not for everyone. Here we present some tips to help you identify your target audience and how later on drive email marketing with their data.
- Understand the importance of a Target Audience
This is a matter of saving time, nowadays businesses are facing the influx of irrelevant traffic to their websites, it is true that latest tools and techniques have helped to drive the appropriate customer, however the conversion rate from such input is almost negligible in most cases.
Some attempts have been made thanks to content strategies like SEO, however these can catch as many random profiles instantly, but these would be less significant when compared to 500 hits from users who are actually interested in your service or product. So why the importance of identifying an audience? It saves you marketing energy previously used and insignificant, so you can focus on generating revenue with lesser resources if you know what your prospect is looking for.
- Think benefits not features
The greatest way to work out which customers to target it’s by identifying who has a need or interest in your product or service and then narrowing from there. Pinpoint all the different features and qualities of your offer and then think who and how would benefit from these. When you understand the benefits of your own product, you begin to understand who would value these features.
- Collect demographic data on your target audience
To better understand the customer, you should create a demographic portrait, like a customer avatar character with hobbies, interests, dislikes. Make it as detailed as possible with the help of your competitors by checking their socials.
- Send out customer surveys
In this article we explained how to leverage email to conduct surveys and gather user data that leads to conversions. The greatest way to engage with your current customers to know what they like and how to improve on is by talking to them through surveys, the same way they value your product you will need to value their responses.
- Re-evaluate your marketing efforts
Now that you have a bit more information on how to target customers, if your ecommerce target market would benefit from your products and would it truly appreciate its existence? Try figuring out what drives the decision-making wheel among your potential customers and how often they can afford to buy from you. Answering all these questions should help you better prepare your business strategy with respect to your online store’s target audience.
As marketers or eCommerce store owners, we need to manage customer data as what it is, an asset. And we should use it to avoid guessing what the audience wants, needs and desires. We should use the data to build a data-driven email marketing strategy and to build a strong relationship with our customers and leads. In this article we explained how to use the different types of data (zero, first, second and third party data) to get email personalization that converts and powers up your email marketing strategy.
