Discover the Intent behind the Email Marketing

In marketing, intention is everything.

Your marketing strategy should be focused on understanding and building on customer intent, as you can guide them to act on it. And in this space, email is key.

A savvy email marketing strategy can identify and act on customer intent – in a way that few other channels can match the effectiveness of.

How can you use email marketing to work out what your customers want? To learn more, get stuck into this deep dive from the First Page team.

What Are the Benefits of Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a type of online advertising, where you reach out to potential customers and close sales.

Once you have collected a group of subscribers, you can use a targeted email strategy to connect with your brand and entice them to buy your products and services.

It’s a unique channel in digital marketing, with huge potential that many businesses sadly leave unrealised.

The benefit of email marketing is its consistency in providing a return on investment, making it one of the most efficient digital channels.

Not only is it often more cost-efficient than other channels in digital marketing, but another benefit of email marketing is it can be wildly effective. Through emails, you can keep your audience informed and interested in your brand and its offerings.

When it comes to assisting your team in converting the window shoppers into purchases and one-off shoppers into ardent brand loyalists, nothing beats a savvy email content marketing campaign.

Email Subscribers Have Higher Intent

It’s easy for someone browsing on TikTok or Pinterest to click on an ad – with not much intent to shop – and end up on your website. However, the web visitors who come from an email are in a different category, right off the bat.

Email subscribers have chosen to be in touch with your brand, so they already care about the products and services you have to offer. If they’re on your website because they clicked on a call-to-action button on an email, then they’re here with a much higher intent to shop than someone doom-scrolling on the Insta feed.

It’s important that your marketing strategy takes this into account, so you can maximise sales from this key group of customers.

Use Email Marketing to Identify Intent

When it comes to understanding who your customers are and what they want, many business owners prefer to rely on their website.

After all, the website is where the entire conversion process takes place. It’s the centrepiece for bringing people in to see your brand and understand your product. Everything is tagged up so you can understand how the user moves through your web pages, consumes web content, and decide to make a purchase.

But these days, it’s not enough to study how your customers browse your website.

Web Traffic vs Email Subscriptions to Identify Intent

Web browsing was a greater indicator of purpose a couple of decades ago, back when everyone was on the internet via a desktop computer. So if someone was on your website, they had a greater intention to complete a transaction or some other kind of measurable goal.

Today is a world away. With so much content being passed around on social media sites and read on phones, a person being on your website doesn’t qualify them as a lead as much as it used to.

Nothing Beats Email Marketing for Intent

It can be difficult to spot the difference between casual browsing on a website or the type of content consumption that leads to a purchase. On the other hand, email is a cutting tool to separate the wheat from the chaff.

To create, recognise, and respond to intent, email is one of the most reliably high-performing channels available to digital marketers.

Study Email Behaviour for User Signals

The people who respond to your emails do so in a deliberate way. By tracking and studying the patterns in your subscribers’ email behaviours, you can uncover the intent behind their browsing and shopping.

Track and Learn from Your Emails

The ideal digital strategy is to set up your email marketing analytics so that your team is able to track and learn about your subscribers.

When they visit your website, what information or products do they want to find? What is their intent, and how are you meeting the needs of your web users?

The idea is to sift through the patterns, looking for the valuable users you need to target.

For example, can you, as a marketer, identify which email subscribers are correlated to a serious shopping intent, as opposed to just casual browsing on your site?

Finding Subsets of Your Customers

If an email subscriber clicks on a call-to-action on an email and lands on your website’s landing page, then they search on your website and end up spending some time on a few specific products, before returning to browse some more product categories – then that implies a serious shopping intent. This person is looking to buy.

A good email marketer will be able to glean who are the valuable or important subscribers who need to be catered to so they can be nurtured down the sales funnel.

Perhaps you find there’s a subset of your subscribers who consistently click on your emails advertising a sale. They may be your dependable shoppers, the ones who can be relied on to turn out in numbers for a shopping spree.

Another subset may be interested in seasonal trends, so you can entice them into becoming repeat shoppers at recurring points throughout the year.

Connect Email Behaviour to Purchases

Your email marketing team should look for links between a subscriber’s email behaviour and their browsing and purchasing activity. Find out what people are looking for, and what they need to know before they commit to buying.

Compared to the wealth of information you can find out from email marketing analytics, it’s not enough to only study the browsing behaviour from Google Analytics.

For a more holistic view of the entire user journey – from the bird’s eye view – you need to have killer email marketing analytics to complement the rest of your marketing campaigns.

Catch Them Before They Fall

Most of the people browsing your website will view a few products, or perhaps information pages such as the shipping FAQs. Then they’ll click off your website, without having made any sort of purchase.

How do you bring them back?

Chasing Up Abandoned Carts

Email is a key channel to target the abandonment of shopping intent. A simple follow-up message can target them to return to their shopping cart – or if not, your marketing team can at least use it to try to work out why a shopper abandons their cart.

For example, you could send a follow-up email to everyone who abandons their cart. Keep it short and sweet, with a subject line asking if there is anything your business could do to help them.

Getting Direct Feedback

The idea is to open lines of dialogue, so you can get feedback directly from the horse’s mouth.

If there are cheaper ways to buy the same product, you want to know that. If the shipping is too expensive or takes too much time, you want to know that. Whatever the common reasons to abandon the cart may be, email marketing is a powerful tool to get direct feedback on how to improve your business, from the people who matter the most to it.

In this way, email content marketing can get direct signals on shopping behaviour and intent, in a way that few other digital channels can match.

Email Is a Powerful Marketing Tool

Email marketing is a key digital marketing to take note of, for any business that wants to maximise sales and revenue from its customer base.

Is any of this a ground-breaking new idea? Perhaps not, but what sounds easy in theory can be difficult to apply in practice. Instead of merely selling, email marketers need to be ready to explore and develop, so they can learn more about your target audience and how to nurture them down the sales funnel.

Email content marketing is an excellent channel to harness as part of your digital strategy. If applied correctly, it can become a powerful tool to study and reach out to your customers, especially some of the most important sub-sets of your customer base.

Why It’s So Important to Market to Intent

Any small business owner worth their brand’s name is all too familiar with the adage, the customer is always right.

Of course, that’s not always the case, but the point sticks: For a business to survive, it has to do all it can to meet the diverse needs and wants of its customers.

Competing on the World Stage

Though “the customer is always right” sounds like it belongs to the ’50s Mad Men era, it’s actually more true today than it has ever been in the past. The days of your brand only competing with the shops on your stretch of road are long gone.

Today, your business exists on the internet – where all your customers are. And now you’re not just competing with your neighbours, but with every other business that operates in the same SEO space as you.

With brand loyalty at all-time lows, your customers can pack up and leave at any point they want; if a different website is offering the same for better or cheaper or faster, why wouldn’t they?

Marketing Based on Intent

It’s a tough world, and if you want to survive, your business needs every advantage it can get its hands on. That means meeting the various needs of your various customers, each and every time. With so little room to make a mistake, you have to get it right.

If your business is the one that knows what your customers look for in a product and delivers a seamless user experience to boot, your business is the one that they’ll choose to shop with, over your competitors’.

This is where intent-based marketing comes in.

From PPC to SEO to emails, marketing based on intent is about catering to the unique needs of each subset of customers, rather than just assuming they’re a homogenous whole and pushing random items at each person in the hopes they’ll click.

Instead of being overly pushy – and pushing your potential customers away – it’s better to be subtle and nuanced in your approach.

Modernise Your Approach

By focussing on the needs of the user, you can enhance their experience of subscribing to your emails, staying in contact with your brand and, ultimately, shopping on your website. It’s how you keep them coming back for more.

With intent-based marketing, you can revamp your advertising for the modern era.

Instead of intrusive advertising that pushes into people’s face, intent-based marketing complements SEO to get to know your customers better – and speak to them on their terms. By building this relationship, you can work on driving more sales.

Unleash the Power of Email Marketing

Even though email marketing ideas require a fair bit of work, any brand that uses emails well will be able to reap plenty of benefits.

Are you interested in pursuing an email content marketing campaign to complement the rest of your SEO and online advertising, driving your sales and revenue to new heights you’ve never even dreamed of?

If you’re unsure where to get started, then turn to the best in the game. For sophisticated email marketing ideas and content marketing strategies, you can get in touch with First Page Digital by phone at 1300 479 226.

By leveraging your email content marketing and SEO strategy in the correct way, you can put your business in the best place to achieve your overarching revenue goals. To discover what your customers want you to know about their needs and wants, reach out to the team at First Page, and we can get started on uncovering your customer intent.