A recent email marketing case study by Marketing Sherpa showed a 208% higher conversion rate for targeted mailing (instead of batch-and-blast). Here’s why and how you can use categories in Outlook to do this yourself.
What do we mean by targeted email marketing
Do you send out email newsletters to your contacts? The case study shows that you can get much higher conversion rates and revenue if you create emails for particular segments of your list.
How did they do this?
- They targeted a high value segment. We’ll show you how to segment your list using categories.
- They created a message that met the specific needs of the segment instead of a more general message. Your recipients are more likely to be interested in something specific to them.
- They used a more personal tone in the email.
- They made the customers feel special by personalizing the email’s subject and greeting with the person’s first name. (You can do this from inside Outlook using an addon such as Email Merge)
Using Categories to Segment Your Contacts
Outlook has a feature called categories that you can use to group contacts into segments. Each contact can have as many segments as you want.
If you are using Email Merge PRO for Outlook software, the Email Merge Wizard lets you assign categories, create individual addressed emails, personalize them and send them out in one step.
If you are NOT using Email Merge PRO for Outlook…. You can use the following steps to put your contacts into a particular category.
- Go to your Contacts folder.
- Select the contacts that you want to put in the same category.
- Right click on a contact and click Categorize.
- Select the category that you want (or click All Categories to use the resulting screen to add and assign a new category).
- Repeat the above steps for each contact
Send emails to a category of Contacts
Unfortunately there is no easy way built into Outlook to do the type of personalized segmented email blast described in the case study.
If you want to do it the hard way, you could create a separate email for each contact in your category and then send it out manually.
The significantly easier solution is to use a tool like Email Merge for Outlook that will let you create personalized individually addressed emails for each person in your Outlook category.
Email Merge will let you choose your contacts, write your email, create your category and send out your emails… all from an easy-to-use Wizard… inside Outlook.
Check out the short demo video on our website or test drive Email Merge Pro by downloading the 30 day trial today.
