How to Find Out More About Your Email Subscribers

1. Segmentation

Segmenting email marketing recipient lists will allow you to send more direct and personalised emails to your readers; rather than wasting time and resources on sending mass emails. It means you can focus your marketing strategy and advertising on segments of people who are more likely to make a particular purchase or visit your business; making it an affordable and efficient way to reach potential customers and learn about your audiences.

Many email marketing platforms, like Klaviyo, offer AI-assisted segmentation which allows marketers to segment subscribers by specific behaviours such as past purchase history, content they frequently click or how often they engage. Using this data, we can create super targeted lists that ensure you are sending highly relevant content to the right people, giving you a clear picture of what specific cohorts of your audience actually care about.

2. Use analytics

The best way to learn about your audience is to dive into your analytics reports. Find out what emails perform the best, what day and time are your open rates the highest and what topics are your readers most interested in. Continually monitoring your metrics will help you identify what your audience is interested in and when they best engage, allowing you to alter your marketing strategy to fit this newfound data.

With changes like Apple's Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) making standard 'open rates' highly inaccurate, modern analytics require a deeper look. To understand your subscribers, you must track click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and on-site behaviour after they click a link in your email. Look at which specific links draw the most attention, what time of day generates the most clicks and which devices your audience is using.

3. Experiment with new strategies

When recipients receive the same email template month after month, they will inevitably begin to lose interest and disengage with all of its content. The best way to see what your subscribers like is to test different approaches. Use A/B testing (often automated by modern AI email tools) to test different subject lines, send times, and email formats. Furthermore, this is the era of the interactive email. By using features like AMP for email, you can embed carousels, accordions and interactive product displays directly into the inbox to see exactly what users interact with most.

4. Increase your subscribers

Once you understand the behaviours and interests of your subscribers, it's time to increase your recipient list. A great way to increase your database is by providing an opt-in offer to your customers - who doesn’t love a discount?

Some examples of possible opt-in offers include:

• A competition/giveaway

• Discount code

• Insightful (gated) content (otherwise unavailable to the public)

• Free downloads

• Trial offers

After the opt-in emails have been sent, you can analyse the responses and see how best your recipients have reacted to the offers. Are they looking for promotions across a wide range of products or do they love a freebie?

You could also use progressive profiling which involves building up recipient data over time. This might include starting by asking for their email and first name in exchange for a lead magnet. Then, over the next few emails, gently ask for more information such as industry, preferences or location to gradually build up a rich profile of who is joining your list.

5. Survey & Polls

A perfect way to find out more about your audience is to directly ask them; this can be done with a poll or a survey. Survey Monkey stated that response rates were highest for survey invitations sent out on a Monday, and (unsurprisingly) lowest for invitations sent on a Friday. It’s also worthwhile sending out these types of emails to new email sign-ups, perhaps as a welcome email; here they are most motivated to interact, as they are expecting to hear from your business.

Polls and surveys don’t have to be lengthy; making them short and snappy means you are more likely to get quicker responses and more data from your recipients. For example, a simple "What topic do you want to read about next week?" with three clickable buttons not only boosts engagement but immediately segments those users based on their direct feedback.

At Serenity Digital our clients benefit from the use of our email marketing software and our expertise in creating engaging and on-brand email marketing campaigns which can be delivered to multiple audiences across a range of devices. 

If you have a failing email marketing strategy you wish to improve and would like to learn more about your email subscribers please get in touch with our team of experts today.

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