Email marketing is by far the simplest, most cost-effective solution to get in touch with your customer base. Statista reports that there are more than 3.8 billion email users worldwide, proving it to be a solid tactic to get in touch with consumers and increase sales.

But simply sending out email after email isn’t going to bring you high volume conversions or spiked levels of engagement. If that were the case, any company who sent out a few emails would be guaranteed booming success.

If you’re going to be a brand that successfully reaches its audience, you need a revamped email marketing strategy that takes the consumer into all accounts. That means knowing who they are, anticipating their needs, and conducting research for improved future results.

Let’s look at three surefire ways your brand can use its email platform to build meaningful relationships with customers.

1. Segment subscribers

If you want a higher chance of subscribers opening your emails, you need to segment your email list. This means dividing up your subscribers into groups based on different factors so that you can send them targeted content that meets their needs. By understanding each different group, you’ll be able to increase your conversions and receive a higher level of engagement because you’re showing them relevant content.

MailChimp found that when they segmented their email campaigns, they received 14 percent higher open rates than emails that weren’t segmented, meaning their strategy to target users based on their preferences got them higher conversions.

Groupon does a good job of this by emailing subscribers who have abandoned their carts in the hopes they’ll reconsider purchasing:

You can segment your email list based on multiple factors:

  • Interests
  • Preferences
  • Lead magnet they signed up for
  • Open rate
  • Location
  • Cart, page, or form abandonment

Using this information to connect with subscribers is important because it shows them that your brand is taking extra time and effort to give them products and content tailored to their interests. It makes you stand out from thousands or millions of other businesses who send out robotic email after robotic email and expect a riveting response.

2. Send a friendly welcome email

You don’t want a visitor to sign up waiting for an email from you that either comes too late or never arrives at all. With email, timing is everything. You have to make sure that users hear from you shortly after they sign up. If not, this makes your brand look lazy and disorganized, and it’ll be difficult to build a strong customer relationship.

Create an inviting welcome email that gets automatically sent to new subscribers so that you don’t have to worry about if they received it or not. Introduce them to your brand and its mission and show users what it’s all about. Write like you would to a friend with conversational language so your audience can relate to you on a comfortable, friendly level.

3. Add personal touch

It’s hard to build a meaningful relationship with subscribers when they feel like another number to your business. The less personalized your strategy is to connect with consumers, the harder it’ll be to build an email list that brings in revenue.

An Epsilon survey discovered that 80 percent of consumers are more likely to purchase when brands offer personalized experiences tailored to their needs. When they sign up, it’s likely you’ll have their name in your database. Send emails that address them by the name they put in your optin form. This will catch their attention and shows that your brand is one that aims to connect with its audience instead of just asking them to make purchases.

Consumers want to be treated like they’re human beings with specialized buying behaviors and preferences. Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report found that 52 percent of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t make an effort to personalize communications to them. If you take the extra steps to make them feel special, it could mean a loyal customer for life as well as five to eight times the ROI, according to Harvard Business Review.

Wrapping up

Improving the relationship you have with customers will be the most valuable tactic you implement into your business. Being successful is dependent on the consumer, and if they decide your brand isn’t connecting with them on a deeper level, it could mean the death of your business. Pay attention to what they like, what they want, and how you can personalize the CX for them using personalization and email segmentation. How will you build relationships with your customers?