It takes the right combination of creativity, data and technology to effectively reach high-value prospects with your marketing messages these days. From an email perspective, segmenting your audience goes a long way toward achieving this goal, but an even more granular approach known as “micro-targeting” is gaining traction among successful marketers.

Micro-targeting involves taking your basic prospect and customer groups and further narrowing them into the smallest possible group of common interests/behaviors. For example, while you might segment your audience by age, gender or products in use, micro-targeting involves combining these categories to create even more specific groups – e.g. men, ages 18-25 who live in California who use a particular product. By creating more specific groups, you’ll give your audience what they want, show them you care, reduce spam and drive more revenue – research shows relevant emails drive 18X more revenue than more generic messages.

Here are six tips to leverage micro-targeting within your email campaign strategy:

1. Use all your available data: Be prepared to use and combine all the data at your disposal to create micro-targeted prospect and customer lists. This would include not only their demographics, but information from their product registrations, completed registration forms and surveys, your web pages they’ve visited, data provided from your email service provider – every piece of information you’ve collected from a prospect or customer over the years becomes important for micro-targeting.

2. Take segmentation to the next level: Create smaller subsets of your subscribers and prospects by segmenting repeatedly. You can incrementally segment demographically based on age, income or geography; behaviorally based on previous purchases, inquiries or website viewing history; or on previous email activities, such as opened emails, links that were clicked, etc. Create numerous groups who share a unique set of traits, and customize messages that target these specific attributes.

3. Create hyper-focused messages: With your micro-targeted groups, create messages that highlight these unique qualities. If you’re, say, a corporate travel agency, you can reach out to those who recently used your service, thanking them for their business and offer personal recommendations based on their demographic profile. (e.g. action-oriented, professional, retired, etc.) Include personalization items such as their name in the message, and perhaps show potential flights out of their hometown airport for the destinations they recently visited on your website or clicked on in previous emails. If your prospect showed interest in a particular location, include activities or events taking place in said location.

4. Get triggered: As micro-targeting will cause you to create many more lists and require more time-sensitive outreach, you’ll need to automate to save time and resources. That means leveraging triggered emails as much as possible, such as for welcome or registration emails or when upcoming software licenses are about to need renewing. Triggering can also be initiated by a prospect’s browsing history or abandoned shopping cart.

5. Automated triggers: A sub-section of triggered emails are emails triggered based on specific actions such as a visit to a particular page on the website, to a blog post on another website or to a “like” on a social media post. Content needs to be created in advance, but once it is, emails can be triggered based on behaviors. With this approach, emails are timely.

6. Consider the dynamics: Dynamic content is HTML within your email that changes based on the targeted recipient. With dynamic content, you can swap images, headlines, text and calls-to-action based on the prospects’ profiles, micro-segment groups or purchase or browsing history. Creating a single email that changes content automatically can be a real time saver, and creates customized personalization at scale.

Micro-targeting gives you a way to differentiate yourself in a crowded inbox. By collecting and leveraging prospect and customer data, you’ll be able to send the hyper-relevant email messages your audience wants  – which means they’ll be much more likely to respond.

Outward Media’s proven data cleansing services and targeted, accurate email data can enable you to achieve better email marketing ROI and, ultimately, convert more prospects into customers. Take a look at our case studies to find out more.