5 Ways SharpSpring Can Maximize Your Email Marketing Results

Email marketing without a strategy and proper targeting is everyone’s late 1990s nightmare – spam that goes directly to trash. Fortunately, in 2018 you have plenty of excellent tools at your disposal – if you use their full potential, you will be able to generate high-quality leads and convert them to sales for a fraction of expenses you’d pay using classic advertising tools. All you need is a marketing automation tool – and you’ll find it on SharpSpring. Let’s start!

The times when marketing was all about reaching as many people as you can are long gone. In 2018, it’s all about reaching the right people – and target marketing is alpha and omega of these marketing efforts. Why?

Target marketing allows you to break into the market on a limited budget. You are not shooting blindly, hoping that your message will stick somewhere – you know exactly what you’re aiming for and the chances are you’re going to score. What is the channel where this is most likely to happen? Your good old email. You are not convinced?

Email statisticsSome statistics that may change your mind. (Source: GetResponse)

This is why the founder of Social Triggers Inc. Derek Halpern decided to run an experiment and send a link to the same number of his social network followers and email subscribers. He received 300 clicks to his website from Twitter and 4200 clicks from his email list.

Enough to convince you? Then keep reading how Sharpspring can help you turn these numbers into reality.

1. Generate Leads

Quizzes can be a highly-rewarding, unique a tool that can help you find your audience and acquire their email address. In these series, you can find a detailed strategy for growing your email list.

How SharpSpring Can Help

After your email list grows sufficiently, it is time to put Sharpspring into action. With its workflow builder, Sharpspring allows you to visualize the buyer’s journey. In this builder, you can create and expand each task according to your plan.

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Seems a bit overwhelming when the tasks start branching? Don’t worry, we will break it down for you.

2. Segment Your Leads

First, you need to segment your leads.

Why do we keep talking about the importance of segmentation? As we said – an aimless email is a spam. According to Salesforce, segmented personalized emails have 29% higher open rates and 41% higher unique click rates.

Segmentation allows you to identify and profile different groups of customers with similar needs. There are several ways to segment your customers – according to location, demographic, personality and behavior – and we suggest you do it in that order. Here you’ll find advice on collecting valuable data using quizzes and online surveys.

Before we start, keep in mind this. Relevant, useful marketing segments have to meet the following criteria. They have to be:

  • Measurable – the size, purchasing power, and characteristics of the segments can be measured
  • Substantial – the segments are large and profitable enough to serve
  • Accessible – the segments can be effectively reached and served
  • Differentiable – the segments respond differently to different marketing-mix elements and programs

Start with the simplest segmentation – if it does not make sense for your product, move to the next type of segmenting customers.

Geographic segmentation

Geographic segmentation divides the market based on location – be it a country, state, region, city or even a neighborhood – depending on the product and the scope of your services. Each segment requires a different approach – and running small, localized marketing campaigns is nothing to frown upon. They have a great capacity for going viral, creating buzz, and building your brand. This is how famous Nike started – by sponsoring local athletes. They’ve made it pretty far from there, didn’t they?

Demographic segmentation

This is the most widely used type of segmentation. It divides the customers according to their age, gender, education, religion, family size, generation, income, occupation, family life cycle and social class. There is probably no need to explain why this information is so valuable – each of these variables affects people’s purchasing habits in dozens of ways. In this article, you can find more information how to gather this data.

How Sharpsping Can Help

Dynamic Lists

After you decide how you will segment your customers, Sharpspring enables you to create dynamic lists of leads, which automatically update when contacts meet the list’s criteria you previously set.  The list’s criteria can start off with basic segmentation, such as location or demographics. As the time goes and you learn more about your customers, you can add even more specific criteria and create new lists. 

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Dynamic Landing Pages and Emails

The look of your landing page depends on the product or service you’re offering. Similar rule applies to emails. If you are sharing information in pursuit of clicks, you should go for a fairly simple email. If you are looking to sell a product, imagery and a clear call to action are an absolute must.  Sharpspring enables you to right-click to swap out images, headlines and body text aimed at different audience based on who their interests and behavior.

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Dynamic Forms Built for Conversion

With Sharpspring, you can build, customize and reorder fields with the drag-and-drop editor, and the tool also allows you to map fields from 3rd-party and native forms. Sharpsrping has a library of responsive templates and pre-built layouts that fit any device.

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3. Learn About Your Leads

Psychographic segmentation becomes possible as you start engaging with your customers on a regular basis.

This type of segmentation fuses demographics and psychology and it is useful in terms of personalizing your approach to the customer and understating the purchasing process. One of the ways to classify different types of customers is the VALS system which divides people according to their values and lifestyles. It groups them into two categories based on income, and additional subcategories based on their personality.

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Higher resource group
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Lower resource group

Keep in mind that this system is reliable specifically in the United States – research in other countries has shown that different cultures result in different customer types across the globe. Joined with other types of segmentation, VALS can help you shape your marketing strategy – you’re probably able to say which products are disproportionately purchased by certain VALS types.

How SharpSpring Can Help

At this point, SharpSpring becomes an essential tool for further engagement with your potential customers – and it can help you successfully segment your leads into VALS types.

After-the-Click Behavioral-Based Email Tracking

SharpSpring can provide you with complete information on a customer’s activity after they click through from an email. You will be able to track the way they engage with your emails and website.

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Lead Scoring

As you study your leads’ interests and interaction with your website and product, SharpSpring can score them based on the level of engagement. After that, you can opt to further segment the customers or adjust marketing strategy for groups with lower responsiveness.

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Lead Nurturing

Based on the scores, you can automate drip email campaigns to continually engage with customers as they move through the sales funnel.

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Leverage Personas

This process will allow you to nail down the exact types of your customers – SharpSpring enables you to build out your buyer personas using a customizable template. You can use these templates to create ultra-personalized dynamic emails and landing pages that resonate with each persona.

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4. Engage Leads at Critical Points

The process of click-tracking, lead nurturing and scoring, as well as leveraging personas, enables you to get to the bottom of your customers’ pool and segment them according to their behavior.

Behavioral segmentation is based on:

  • Customer’s needs and motives behind purchase 
  • The dynamic of decision making – in general, customers can be divided into five groups (initiator, influencer, decider, buyer, and user)
  • The occasion and the buyer-readiness stage

How SharpSpring Can Help

Engagement

Once your segmentation efforts crack the code of an individual customer’s behavior, you can go back to the workflow builder from the beginning of our story and decide how and when you’re going to target each group of your customers.  SharpSpring will provide you with a list of each day’s hottest leads right to your inbox, and you can choose to act. 

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Triggers

We’ve already written about the importance of follow-up when a customer gives up on your product – abandoned cart should be one of the triggers for an email. SharpSpring enabled this automated process.

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Transformative Email Analytics

Whatever you do, measuring your results and experimenting with outcomes should be high on your list of priorities in marketing campaign. SharpSpring provides you with tool that tracks email success by measuring clicks, opens, bounces, and deliveries.

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5. Solidify Your Target Market

As your email marketing campaign develops and you understand your customers better, your business, product and brand will slowly evolve. When you learn about the buyers, you essentially learn about yourself. This will help you decide whether your product will go with:

Multiple Segment Specialization

This means marketing and selling your product to different groups of customers which don’t have much in common – but find their meeting point in your product. This approach may be more complicated to maintain, but it also carries the advantage of diversifying the risk for your business.

Single Segment Concentration

With single-segment concentration, you dig deeper into the specific customers’ needs and focus all your marketing efforts on that group. This allows you to assert yourself more easily and maintain continuous market presence. Even better, in time this group may turn into a niche – with customers who have a distinct set of needs and are ready to cash out for them.

Conclusion

SharpSpring received a 4.5/5 score on Software Advice based on 214 user reviews. Users rated it highly for simplicity, value, pricing plans and the palette of features. Most of the criticism was aimed at clunky interface, limited designing options, and glitches after the release of new features. While there are more powerful automation tools available, SharpSpring provides great value for business beginners on limited budget.

In conclusion, no matter how your product develops, SharpSpring is well equipped to be your unique all-in-one marketing automation tool that can respond to each challenge of your target marketing.

Build Your Email List By 100K This Year Using Quizzes

Get Started

Build Your Email List By 100K This Year Using Quizzes

Get Started