Miss Congeniality:

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Miss Congeniality:
How to Give Your Email Marketing
Campaigns a Winning Personality
You’re
with Jo
Giving you the
confidence and
expertise to get
the most from your
email marketing.
Your Adestra Training Manager
Miss Congeniality: how to give your
email marketing campaigns a winning
personality
Targeting customer personas and developing
strong ‘brand voices’ will help your email
campaigns connect with readers on a
deeper level.
Nobody is interested in reading irrelevant emails. If your messages read like they’ve been written by a computer
trying to beat the Turing test, they aren’t going to keep readers engaged for long. That’s assuming recipients
actually read them, and don’t just hit the delete button.
The fact is, competition for attention has never been higher. Inboxes are flooded daily with a tide of promotions,
newsletters and emails all begging to be opened. There is, however, a way to ensure your email marketing
messages resonate with your audience. And that is to give them a unique personality that lights a beacon in
recipients’ minds when they see your name.
Using the power of personality to get your messages noticed isn’t
rocket science.
But many businesses struggle to project a unique personality in their
email campaigns. This could be because, compared to social media,
email has a reputation for being an efficient but rather dull and unsexy
sales vehicle. But, when handled properly, it’s quite the reverse.
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Three common email marketing
‘personalities’
Emails resonate when they appeal on a human level. To go a step further, they
resonate even more when they appeal to the buyer persona of your target
audience. Email campaigns also naturally develop a split personality over
time. Rather than a cause for alarm, this is a good indicator of a healthy email
marketing strategy. It shows that you are adjusting your email’s personality to
suit both its content and to appeal to the persona of your target audience.
If you read a lot of email marketing, you may recognize these different voices in marketing copy:
Mr Witty – Best done by Innocent Smoothies.
These emails communicate a brand’s fun side, packed with pop culture references and industry
inside jokes. In B2C, this helps foster a stronger affinity with the brand as people start to see
it as a person, rather than a cold, profit driven entity. B2B organizations can also benefit from
appearing more human — a popular approach among quirky technology brands. More formal
companies, like law firms and accountants, might want to handle this persona with care,
though. Presenting a jokey side can be taken out of context and make the brand look foolish.
Ms Factoid – Best done by Dell.
Whether you sell sparkplugs or software, educating readers is a powerful way of promoting
your product without overt selling. How-to guides, case studies, and survey findings bypass
your readers’ anti-sales radar and convince with stats and evidence. Adopting this personality
type also helps your brand sound intelligent and helpful, making it the perfect warm-up act for
the next persona on the list.
The Sales Guy – Best done by Tesco.
When you take away all the rapport building, an email campaign’s core aim is to sell. In B2C
a sales email can be as simple as a voucher or product recommendations based on previous
buying history. When you’re selling high value or complex products in the B2B world, however,
more subtlety is needed. Your emails need to highlight the real world problem your product
solves and why the prospect should take advantage of your solution. As always, turn features
into benefits. Sell readers the hole in the wall, rather than the drill.
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These email types, or personalities, are all likely to make an appearance if you want to build rapport and educate
readers before making them an offer. Providing lots of value before asking readers to buy your product is also
good manners and an excellent way to drive up response.
Create customer personas to improve response
Along with reflecting on your email’s content, the personality of your messages
should match that of your target reader. For marketing purposes, three common
personality types are:
Emotionally driven
These people respond well to aspirational stories about how your product
helped someone overcome a problem and succeed in their personal life.
Technically minded
Respond well to facts and studies which explain in specific detail how the
product works.
Financially minded
Want the bottom line on what they can gain in cost and time savings and
other benefits. They want exact figures and proof.
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Adjusting your message to suit these personality types can help your emails resonate more and improve response.
But which personality type should you appeal to? These are six ways of creating personas for your readers:
1
2
3
4
5
Use your intuition on what you know about your customers already. What sort
of people buy your products? What problems do you help them solve? Why
does solving this problem matter to them? The Sales team is a great help here.
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you identify the pain points
and the benefits to promote in your email marketing.
Get to know your customers without the guesswork by contacting them
directly. Interview them over the phone, meet them face to face or send out
surveys to find out what they actually think.
Use the data you already have. This can include which emails generate the
most clicks, the pages they visit and the products they buy, along with data
on demographics, income, profession and other valuable nuggets to be
unearthed from all those numbers.
Keep tabs on which emails are being shared in social media to reveal the
topics and products your prospects are most interested in and want to know
more about.
Geo-track your email responses to reveal whether your prospects are
interested in promotions in their region. You can also refer to the hot topics in
their city or country to make your messages more personalized and relevant.
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6
Run A/B and multivariate tests to identify with cold, hard numbers how you
can adjust the tone and content of your emails to appeal to different personas.
Heatmaps also allow you to see where readers are clicking so you can see
which parts interest them the most.
The ultimate benefit of developing buyer personas is that it enables you to segment your database between each
one. You can then craft campaigns which are more targeted at each persona, featuring topics, tone and products
that are more likely to resonate. Click throughs and conversions will naturally improve as a result.
Email Personalization Quick Tips
Write down your brand values to identify how you can create a personality that makes it stand out
from your competitors
Look at the existing data you have on customers to identify patterns in demographics and
buying behavior
Speak to customers directly to learn about what matters to them
Create personas for your different customer types
Test and track the improvements gained from giving your email marketing some added personality
Segment your database so you can send more relevant messages to each persona
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