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Discussion on: The Complete Beginner's Guide to Email Marketing

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garrett profile image
Garrett / G66

Great questions!

I always find getting emails from companys when I have signed up to their service to be a real pain. How do you avoid this

I generally use a personal-style brand voice. For any of my companies, the emails are always coming from me, Garrett. I sign everything, and if you hit reply, the email comes back to my inbox so that I can see it and respond. I'm extremely personal about it and I keep formalities out of it as much as possible.

Read more about that here:

When working in a market inwhich you don't know what the user is interested in

Okay gotta stop you right there. If you don't know what your market is interested in, you need to do more market research and set up customer personas. And you need to do this first before any other thing in marketing, because all your marketing will come back to customer personas.

Read more about that here:

(for more generic,open markets which entice different types of people) how do would you suggest making the post so it interests or at least doesn't bug the user? Is there a way to make custum messages for different audiences or is their no automated way to do so without making your own tech solution based on their internet habbits (on your site)

You can automate this in ConvertKit. Here's their features page showing how.

and would doing so violate any laws or be to invasive of their privacy?

In ConvertKit, they have to start the process by signing up on your form, and then there's a double opt-in email that they receive to confirm they want to start the process, so it does not violate any laws nor their privacy w/out their consent.

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jeddevs profile image
Theo

Thanks for the indepth answers and great tip, I'll definitly adoptusing a more personel voice for it in the future.

Just want to expand on my last point which may have been slightly misunderstood on either my end or yours.

When working in a market inwhich you don't know what the user is interested in

I'm more focusing on markets inwhich everyone old or young needs, e.g paper or supermarkets. But I suppose for the later certain age ranges certaily prefer certain shops (e.g Waitrose -> The older generation).

But in general for these markets how do you discern between them as you only get a limited amount of information about them unless you asked for their age bracket on signing up which would push many potential customers and subscribers away or should you play it safe and just send out very general not user custamized and/or oriented messages.

If I'm incorrect in any of the above, please do correct me.
Looking forward to your reply.
Many thanks,
Theo.

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garrett profile image
Garrett / G66

I think I could better answer your question if you explain to me exactly what you're trying to do. Are you starting a super market?

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jeddevs profile image
Theo

🤣, No I'm just interested as to how it'd differ for a market in whch there is no bias to a certain age range or type of person and those where some just some examples of the top f my head, sorry for the confusion!

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garrett profile image
Garrett / G66

Got it. So, for the super market example, there's a few things going on:

  1. The product brands mostly market themselves
  2. The super markets market themselves as being better than the other super markets
  3. You can have more than one "customer avatar"

Unpacking 1. The product brands mostly market themselves.

A brand product such as Oreo is going to market themselves, and people just know to go to their local supermarket to get it, right? Oreo's customer avatars may be:

  • Kids - ages 6-12, male
  • Kids - ages 6-12, female
  • Parents - with kids ages (see above)
  • Etc

They might even break those down even more since kids at age 6 are into different things than kids at age 12.

They'll create individual content targeting each of those customer avatars.

Unpacking 2. The super markets market themselves as being better than the other super markets

I've never worked for a supermarket so I'm not sure how they handle customer avatars, but for the most part I would assume they focus on adults. They could break those into various customer avatars such as:

  • Parents
  • Single parents
  • Single businessmen (and women, as a separate avatar)
  • Etc.

Again, creating unique content for each avatar.

For example, to advertise to single parents they might say "Our supermarket has the best child seats in carts to keep them safe and sound while you're shopping."

To advertise to a single businessman they might say "All of our cashiers are always on hand to get you in-and-out on your lunch breaks."

These would be two different commercials, or ads, or whatever. Each targeting a different one of their customer avatars.

Unpacking 3. You can have more than one "customer avatar"

By now I hope I have explained well enough that you can have more than one customer avatar and all you need to do is create content dedicated to each avatar. Don't try to make generic content to hit everyone. Separate all of your customers into their own types (the customer avatar) and then when you're creating content, focus on one type per piece of content.

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jeddevs profile image
Theo • Edited

Thank you for taking the time to break this down for me, I was still referring more to the online and email area but I can use what I learnt here and transfer it to apply for that pretty easily! Thx!

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garrett profile image
Garrett / G66

Create tags for each customer avatar. Use the tagging automation mentioned in the guide and then write your emails based on the customer avatars and send only based on the tag.

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jeddevs profile image
Theo

Great, Many thanks!