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Proven Strategies for Building Your Best Email Audience List

Paige working at a laptop, curating to build the best email audiences for our clients

Email is still one of the best ways to communicate with and market to your audience. It remains an essential communication tool used by the majority of the population and is how most customers prefer to receive communications from brands. However, email’s strength as a marketing tool depends on the quality of your audience list. An engaged audience is interested in your newsletters, with a substantial portion opening, reading, and clicking them. The key is building that perfect subscriber list. We’ll explain the proven strategies for building your best email audience list in this blog.

A Visible and Present Email Signup

You might only just be starting your email newsletter and need to build your subscriber list or you’re looking to grow it to a more substantial following. To get more users, you will need them to voluntarily sign up and explicitly consent to receiving your emails. Provide an email signup that is always accessible to users. The standard place to put an email signup is in your website’s footer. This will provide a visible but unobtrusive signup form on every page of your site. No matter what page a user visits, they can see the option to sign up. Another option is at your point of sale (POS) online and in-person. Your online checkout can include a simple checkbox where users can provide their consent to receive email signups. As customers check out in your brick-and-mortar store, you can similarly provide an opportunity for them to sign up by offering digital receipts.

A Website Popup

Another standard method for collecting emails is a website prompt that offers users an email signup form. This ensures every visitor learns about your email list in case they do not see the form in your website’s footer. Be sure to delay this popup to at least 30 seconds or one minute after someone has been browsing your website. Also, the popup should be easily closed and not obscure the entire webpage. If a popup is too immediate and obtrusive, it will only annoy new visitors to your website. Imagine someone asking you to buy a car before getting a test drive or even seeing the interior. Give users a moment to recognize your business’ value proposition so their interest is piqued. They will then be more likely to want to sign up for your newsletter when prompted.

Enticing Sign Ups

It can help to incentivize users and customers to sign up to your email newsletter. A prevalent but effective strategy is to provide a one-time discount to those who subscribe to your newsletter for the first time. This is great for those already browsing and/or shopping on your site, where the footer and popup can notify them of this discount. To attract other users, we recommend hosting a giveaway or contest where signing up to your newsletter is a requirement for entry. With an enticing prize, users will happily agree to provide their email. Note if you are a service-based business providing a discount will also work, or alternatively, you could provide a sampling of what you provide, such as a free template or one module of a course you provide.

Collect Pertinent Information for Your List

You want to make your signup process simple and fast, otherwise users may abandon it and never join your list. However, there is some essential information you want to collect. Besides the necessary email and explicit consent, you will also want to collect their first and last name. This will help specify the customer in your email system, and you will be able to automatically send emails personalized to their first name in the body text and subject line of future emails. Such personalization gets their attention and can increase open rates by up to 50%. 

Further Personalization for the Best Email Audience

More information about your email subscribers will allow you to craft even more personalized emails. This can include automated communications, such as product recommendations. You don’t and can’t collect that data from the start. Instead, that is information you can gather based on their purchases or browsing behaviour on your website. Email platforms can connect to your ecommerce to unify this information. Another method for obtaining some more of this information is to provide voluntary surveys that help you collect valuable information. 

The Best Email Audience is a Clean Email Audience

A lot of this has focused on growing and expanding the information in your email list. However, a bigger email list is not always better. Be sure to regularly clean out your email audience of any disengaged members. Subscribers who don’t open or click your emails will negatively impact these rates, but more importantly, won’t give you a proper sense of what email content is resonating. Set up automations that both sunset and try to win back these subscribers. In either case, you will have a reengaged subscriber or cleaned your list to be more effective.

Constant Maintenance

All these strategies are essential to building your best email audience. Just like the perfect garden, the truly best email list needs to be constantly maintained with sowing, fertilizing, pruning, and weeding. If you’re wanting to start email newsletters, expand your audience, or set up crucial automations, contact us about our expert email services.

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Scrolling for Talent: Mastering the Art of Recruiting through Social Media

Woman doing a zoom interview on her laptop.

Naturally, social media is important for a business’ marketing. However, as a tool for social reach and creating connections, social media has also become a central platform for recruiting and hiring new employees. We explain why you should post jobs, where to post, and what the best practices are so you can master the art of recruiting through social media.

Why Hire Through Social Media

Hiring through social media has become standard practice for most industries. More than three fourths of people search for new jobs on social media, and 73% of people between the ages of 18 and 34 found their current position through social media. 91% of employers report using social media for recruiting, and 56% have found that social media offers the best applicants. Those statistics quickly indicate that you should be hiring through social media, but they also deserve some unpacking to truly demonstrate the importance of recruiting through social media. 

Applicants with Real Connections and Enthusiasm

You should still post to online job boards and listing platforms such as Indeed or Monster along with having a dedicated “Careers” page on your own website. Those spaces help cast a wider net and provide the full details of a position (e.g. requirements, expectations, and responsibilities) and your company. Where social media excels, however, is reaching potential recruits who are sincerely interested and already familiar with your company. 

Those seeing your job listing on social media are already in some way connected to your business and brand. They might follow you, be part of your industry, or you might appear in their suggestions. In all these instances, they have a clear connection and social attachment. As a result, social media can provide you with a pool of applicants that have a sincere enthusiasm for and familiarity with your company. They are not just someone who stumbled upon your listing among a dozen others. That connection implies they are already personally invested in your business, and that is a valuable trait for a future employee who also meets a position’s professional requirements. That real connection and authentic interest are why companies are seeing such success with social media recruiting. 

Where to Recruit on Social Media

Since recruiting on social media is so essential and beneficial, you’re also probably wondering which platforms to use for recruitment. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, you should pick the platforms where you have the most significant following. For example, one business may have a substantial following on Instagram, while another has theirs on TikTok. Each business should focus its social media recruitment on those respective platforms. 

You should similarly consider the different demographics for each platform. For example, the age of TikTok and Instagram users skew younger than other platforms. If you are hiring for an entry-level position, you will likely receive more responses and applications from that younger audience. Conversely, Facebook has a much wider demographic of users. While recruiting there is less targeted, it’s better for casting a wider net. 

LinkedIn 

LinkedIn deserves special mention since it is in its own niche as a professional social media platform. It’s always best to post any recruitment there since LinkedIn allows you to specifically create recruiting listings through which people can directly apply. It is also the only social media platform focused on professional relationships and career development, so anyone closely following your company on LinkedIn is inherently interested in career opportunities from your company. As the primary professional social platform, it is also an exceptional place for your business to build a professional presence and network for future hirings.

Social Media Recruiting Best Practices

When you start recruiting through social media, here are some of the best practices to remember:

  • Post on multiple social media platforms to get the most reach.
  • The visual component of any content should make it immediately clear it is a job posting. Bold letters that say “We’re Hiring” are a simple but effective tactic.
  • Excluding your full posting on LinkedIn, don’t provide the full details about the position in your post. You won’t have room. Instead, include the main details that will entice someone to look at the full position’s listing.
  • Be specific. Job seekers want precise information, so don’t be vague about the position’s key details. 
  • If they’re interested, potential applicants will want to access the full posting. Be sure to include a direct link to the listing and application window. 
  • Use Instagram stories. Since Instagram posts cannot have a link, be sure to use stories to include those links. The post itself should provide clear directions on where applicants can apply, such as providing the link in the bio.
  • Stories and other live posts are also great for providing updates. This reinspires (and reminds) those potential applicants who need to put their applications together.

Social Media Recruiting, A Valuable Resource

Social media may have changed the logistics of recruiting, but it has also provided an immensely valuable tool for finding sincere and enthusiastic applicants. You should now understand the benefits and best practices for recruiting through social media. If you need help creating graphics or writing posts, our social media marketing team are masters of enticing hiring. You should also contact them to determine which platforms will provide the best applicants for your business and help you build your presence on LinkedIn.

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Who Are Your Customers? Targeting A Customer Persona

A shop owner interacting with a customer.

Your marketing is essential to your business’ growth, but it needs to be focused. You can cast a wide net to get a few catches of the many fish in the marketing sea. That can be a functional strategy in some circumstances, but it is far more efficient and effective to aim your marketing towards certain target groups interested in your business’ products and services. To determine these targets, marketers create customer personas, which significantly improve the performance of all your ads. Targeted marketing is up to 5.3 times more effective for increasing click-through rates, nearly 40% of people prefer targeted ads, and targeted ads have shown to increase brand searches by 800%! Along with those conversions, these results will only increase your ROI even more, since you will spend less on target ads than on widescale, untargeted marketing. This guide will explain what customer personas are, how to create them, and how to use them in your marketing.

What are Customer Personas?

A customer persona is an imaginary person defined by certain demographics and characteristics of a key member of your current or desired target audience. Qualities that can define a customer persona are their interests, profession, finances, age, gender, language, locality, etc. These qualities need to be specific enough to define a subgroup of an audience, but also broad enough to reflect more than just one individual. Typically, a business will have multiple customer personas within its whole audience.

How to Define Your Customer Personas

To create and define your target personas, you will need to some research about your business’ current and/or desired audience. If you have been running your business for a few years, you should already have some familiarity with your business’ target(s). If you are already using Google and Meta for your advertising, these platforms collect valuable information about their users. They will provide you with a wide set of analytics about your business’ advertising and search to help generate target personas. There are numerous other research methods for determining target personas, including surveys, interviews, observing industry trends, and analyzing your competitors and their target audiences.

Don’t Forget About a Persona’s Role

An important aspect of these personas is their role. Certain individuals are more likely to make purchases based on certain roles in their personal lives. For example, Old Spice’s series of “Hello Ladies” advertisements that began in 2010 were a result of the deodorant company determining a major target audience of women customers who purchased deodorant for their male partners. While Old Spice’s primary audience consisted of men with the role of users, these women had the purchasing role that made them a critical target and essential to the company’s rebranding this past decade.

These roles can be more difficult to determine than the raw demographics provided to you by various marketing platforms and tools. They rely on observing and analyzing your customers’ behaviour. However, they can prove invaluable for understanding and strategizing around the purchasing power and decisions of a target customer.

How to Use Your Customer Personas

Customer personas will allow you to plan and specifically strategize any focused marketing campaign. Specific products or services of your business may not appeal to your entire audience, so knowing your business’ targets will allow you to properly focus on individual marketing campaigns. For example, PPC advertising platforms like Google Ads and Meta will allow you to set targets for each ad campaign. By defining your customer personas, you will be able to appropriately target each one of these ads. 

You will similarly use these personas in your social media marketing, to strategize which posts will best attract engagement. An important strategizing factor is customer personas’ preferred platforms. Certain targets may be specific to one platform for your digital marketing such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Any marketing on these platforms should be targeted toward the interests of that specific customer persona. 

The Importance of Refining and Redefining Your Customer Personas

Defining and targeting customer personas is not simply a one-and-done deal. You should regularly refine them as you receive more data and complete more research. This refinement will help you determine whom to exclude from your customer personas. For example, women might be a general target audience, but you may find that those under the age of 20 or those over the age of 60 are not typically your customers. This kind of information refines your business’ customer personas to be more accurate targets.

You will also need to redefine your target and customer personas as both your business and audience naturally change over time. To come back to the Old Spice example, the company is currently again retargeting its marketing as they have determined new younger customer personas. This continuous research is also important for developing and strategizing your business’ brand, products, and services. It’s not enough to merely know your audience, you need to keep understanding them.

Keep Your Eye on the Target

Creating and maintaining customer personas is essential to effective marketing and business strategizing. Knowing the subgroups of your audience will allow you to more directly communicate with them and grow your business’ reach among these individuals. It will also ensure your business isn’t pursuing audience dead ends. If you need help creating, finding, or redefining your target audience and customer personas, contact Rosewood’s digital marketing team. They’ll help you get and keep your eyes on the target.

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