Growing your brand awareness and sales using Email Marketing

Tips to profiling your audience

For those of our clients in the B2B sector we’re now working with a data partner to purchase qualified GDPR compliant lists that we can use to increase brand awareness through Email Marketing. The biggest challenge in identifying new audiences is to fully understand who you are wanting to target, and what they are interested in. Will they be interested in what you have to offer?

To help our clients we spend a lot of time in this profiling stage: in broad terms these are the sorts of questions that need answering.

• Who is the decision maker? Keep in mind the decision maker may not be your ideal customer but they are the ones who need to be influenced.
• Who holds responsibility for the purchasing decision? Again this can be different as it might be a board or purchasing department
• Job roles? But also what job roles or level of experience should be included or excluded?
• Company size? number of employees, turnover, is it multi-site?
• Are you interested in the head-quarters only?
• Individual’s email addresses vs generic email addresses?
• Do you need Telephone numbers?
• Location/region/mileage from your operation?
• SIC code or industry sector or area of activity? A SIC code is a five-digit Standard Industrial Classification code. They are used by government bodies such as Companies House and the Office for National Statistics to systematically identify and categorise the principal business activities of limited companies operating within the UK.

If answered well the targeted data can be a very rich audience who are open to your offer.

Building brand awareness

Buying GDPR compliant data can form part of an effective way of building brand awareness. Take the example of Coventry University’s PRINCE2® B2B courses: the client needed to recruit onto its course from businesses of a particular size, with particular industry sectors. Profiled data was used to recruit directly onto a high-ticket value five day face-to-face course, which is now being delivered online.

Engaging with content

If you understand who you are talking to through effective targeting it is then critical to get under the skin of what your audience wants: not what they need but what they desire? We’ve found that by tailoring our marketing campaigns with this additional insight means open rates and more importantly click throughs increase. Taking new audiences from not knowing who you are through to being ready to engage with your sales team or you directly.

It’s worth also keeping in mind that if you are using new data for brand awareness your messages are likely to be different to the messages you send out to your current or past clients: they may already know who you are and need different motivations to engage again or buy now. So always keep in mind where your prospects are in your sales process.

Monitoring the results to deliver sales

And of course whatever email marketing activities you’re doing the most critical part is to review and refine your target and audience and messaging. Whatever platform you’re using say Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor they all have tools built in to review how campaigns are performing. If you have a more developed process email automation and dynamic content can help to refine your messages and test what works best for you. With data purchased it is normally possible to get updates on opt-ins over a period of time so that your source data is up to date and fully GDPR compliant.