RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.
Subscriber personas might sound like something from a Criminal Minds episode, but every great marketer needs a persona, and this is doubly true for email marketing.
If you want your emails to actually land and resonate, you need to go beyond names and email addresses.
You need to build subscriber personas.
But how do you start knowing what your audience truly wants, and how can subscriber personas drive better results?
Let’s (deep) dive in!
You might be thinking of marketing personas, but subscriber personas are slightly different.
In short, a subscriber persona is a semi-fictional profile of your email subscribers based on real data, behaviours, motivations, and demographics.
The reason a subscriber persona is slightly different from a marketing persona is that it goes deeper, focusing specifically on how people engage with your emails.
Unlike a marketing persona that tends to be focused on the top/middle of the funnel and on attracting and converting customers, a subscriber persona uses data from those already opted in as subscribers to tailor content for engagement and retention purposes.
A subscriber persona helps you to understand:
When done well and thoroughly, subscriber personas will help you to:
For B2B:
Additional data like job roles, industries, company sizes, and buying cycles are useful and relevant.
For B2C:
Look at lifestyle indicators, income ranges, and purchasing behaviours.
If you have gaps in your data, ask!
Use surveys, polls, or follow-up emails to gather:
Don’t worry about perfection. Start with your best assumptions and refine as you learn more (trial and error is the backbone of most great marketing, after all!).
It’s time for you (and your personas) to put in the work!
Your personas can be used to create segments in your ESP, and you can start to adapt tone, messaging, frequency, and content type for each persona, too.
It’s not about saying just what you want to say, it’s about telling your audience what they need to hear (when they need to hear it).
One of the biggest benefits of subscriber personas is that you can not only do just that, you can also prioritise high-converting segments with the most potential because you’re basing your decisions on data, not guesswork!
Too many email marketers make the mistake of thinking that they know their audience.
Knowing isn’t guessing or assuming, or doing it a certain way because “we’ve always done it this way.”
True, meaningful insights come from asking and listening.
Your data doesn’t just sit gathering dust (or it shouldn’t, anyway).
Your data can be used to better understand which type of content is and isn’t resonating, and even when your audience is engaging the most.
It’s also important to keep track of the metrics that aren’t as satisfying, like when your engagement rate drops or unsubscribes or spam complaints rise — your metrics are there to guide you and to make your email marketing better over time.
If you’re sending a salesy follow-up to a discount code and you’re getting unsubscribes, it’s a sign.
If people love your educational content but ignore your product promos, that’s also a clue!
If you want to know what your audience wants to see, then you need to know what motivates them.
Did they subscribe to learn, or to buy? Are they solving a problem, or chasing value? Are they new to your world, or a longtime follower?
Once you know what it is that motivates your subscribers, then you won’t be selling to people who aren’t ready or educating people who want to buy.
Remember: external context matters! If you’re in the middle of an industry crisis, global event, product recall or other wider-world-related-problem, a hard sell following up a bad news cycle is about the worst thing you can do.
Focus on building trust with thoughtful, helpful messages instead.
Your emails land in real inboxes, opened by real people, with real emotions, pressures, goals, and distractions.
If you want to improve results, sending more isn’t the answer.
You need to send better.
That means building personas based on truth, not assumptions, and making sure you’re regularly asking questions to know what your audience wants so that you can adapt to their behaviour and the wider context.
Sending with empathy, precision, and purpose is at the heart of reading the room, and it’s the best way to treat your subscribers like real people rather than robots.
It’s also how email becomes less about ‘just marketing’ and more about being human!
We help brands turn CRM from a passive tool into a powerful growth function.
Book a CRM strategy session with Beth to find out more about how we can help!
RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.