If you’re looking to grow your business, digital marketing is it. The days of blowing your advertising budget on a half-page, black and white ad in the local newspaper to goose sales for your “Labor Day Half-Off Sale!” just seems so ‘90s. You might as well use a 56k dial-up modem to get online to check your Friendster account. In 2016, if you want to reach customers, you need to have a robust presence on social media. Your ranking in search results on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are as important as how you fare on Google. This fact means your business should be willing to invest money in targeted marketing, because identifying your market targets enables you to find opportunities and tap into them. Digital marketing helps make use of proven strategies that attract highly targeted traffic to delivers results. An effective strategy also includes email marketing so targeted, it utilizes list segmentation tools that help you precisely focus on the specific customers you need to boost opens, click-throughs and conversions. In other words, to boost sales.
Collecting data and knowing how to analyze it is the key to effective digital marketing. If you target your message to everyone, there’s a chance it won’t really be noticed by anyone. It makes more sense to use criteria, such as previous behavior (what people have purchased in the past and what they’ve shown an interest in learning more about) to aim your messages at people who are more likely to be interested in what you’re selling. For example, one study found that emails prompted by specific, past customer behaviors produced an impressive 71% higher open rate and an astounding 102% higher click rate than generic emails.
Real World Examples of Digital Marketing
One thing we’ve found when searching for information specifically about B2B email targeting or specifics for paid social targeting success stories, is it’s a bit like trying to find a colleague at a tradeshow. We know they are there, but you have to get through the exhibit hall of sales information to find them. We get it, people are used to having to give up their personal information for a case study, but come on man, all you want is numbers. So here are two real world examples free of charge and all you needed to go though were a few intro paragraphs:
- In B2B email open rates, it really depends on the industry and the ability to work closely with sales teams and CEOs to get a targeted prospect demographic. Over the past year we’ve found that changing the sender from the company name to an executive’s name led to an increase in open rates of almost 53%. Additional targeting to a defined prospect demographic led to open rates of 30 to 45%.
- Working closely with a retail company over the past year, we saw them go from a 1.55% engagement rate over the first seven paid campaigns to a rate of 7.58%. Like most campaigns it was a process of iteration on purchasing behavior by zip codes, societal behavior by area and prospects that fit into the target.
Targeting isn’t easy and finding the right combination never happens on the first try. Finding benchmarks on your industry can also be a challenge. What never changes it that targeting is a process of iteration. Even when you find the right combination (whether that was through your own iterations or by implementing other’s practices) it will change. The digital world is pretty great, though, as the cost to iterate your targets and the amount of data available continues to be affordable for small and growing business to compete. It’s crucial to an effective digital marketing plan as it enables you to identify opportunities and tap into them, helping to deliver the results that will help your business prosper.
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