Don't Be Afraid to Explore the World of Deep Marketing Create highly personalized email campaigns based on who your lead is and what they expect from your business.

By Deepak Kanakaraju

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

You may have heard about drip marketing. But, likely, you haven't heard about Deep Marketing. Drip marketing is a way to send emails to your prospects using an email autoresponder that keeps in touch with your leads through marketing automation. Deep marketing is an advanced way to do drip marketing and email marketing. It combines the personalization of sales with the scale of marketing.

Most of the marketers who generate leads collect names, email IDs and sometimes phone numbers. When they send out email campaigns, they personalize the email with the name tag. Usually, the email campaigns start with something like Hi {subscriber.first_name} where subscriber.first_name is replaced with the name of the subscriber.

Related: How to Use Automation (and Avoid the Pitfalls) as an Entrepreneur

Go beyond Email Marketing 101

Name-personalization is email marketing 101, and pretty much all marketers do it. However, there are much better ways to personalize emails. To personalize the email campaigns more, marketers need to collect more data. With more data, deeper personalization can be done using conditional content tags.

Let's say you are generating leads online. You collect the potential customer's name, email ID, phone and also some more information about your prospect. In my business, a digital marketing training company, I want to know if my lead is a student, freelancer, or entrepreneur. In my lead forms, I add an additional drop-down menu that asks them who they are.

The content of my email campaign will be slightly different for each target market. I sell digital marketing training, and the benefits for each segment are communicated differently.

For example, to students, I tell them that they can get a good digital marketing job - if they learn digital marketing. To freelancers, I tell them that they can do marketing consulting for other businesses and grow their careers. To entrepreneurs, I say that they can grow their business by applying digital marketing to their business.

Going into the technical aspects of how this is implemented is beyond the scope of this article. However, you do not need to learn coding to implement this technique. Different email marketing tools have different standards for implementation. I use ConvertKit, and it has a way to implement conditional content tags.

Related:5 Tips for Better Email Marketing

Go "Deep" for better click and open rates

When you personalize your email beyond first names, you will get better open rates and click rates on your campaigns. Every user will feel like they are getting emails specifically crafted for them.

And it doesn't end there. Apart from collecting information about who they are, you can also collect more information about their goals and challenges.

In the form that my leads fill, I ask them to choose between six goals and five challenges. And I add similar conditional content tags to the same email campaign.

A single email campaign with 3 sets of unique information about the leads, in this case, will give 90 different versions of the same email campaign.

Make your leads feel like you're really talking to them

My leads feel like I am talking directly to them. The open rates of my email campaigns are as high as 70 percent! That's because the emails are personal; they are deep. That's why I call this Deep Marketing. The campaigns are deep, personalized, and effective. Every lead feels like you are talking to them personally.

Creating such campaigns is not easy, and it takes time. But once you know who your target audience is and what to communicate with them, the technology will do the heavy lifting for you. I have generated hundreds and thousands of leads for my digital marketing training program, and all the leads have at least five points of data about them apart from their contact details. And I implement similar campaigns for my clients as well. Every marketing campaign becomes an asset that keeps nurturing the leads for a long time.

I coined the term "Deep Marketing" because I did not find any term in the industry that represents this type of highly personalized email campaign. And you can also implement deep marketing for your websites. Once you know who your leads are, you can cookie their information on their browser and customize the content on the web pages just like you customize the content on email.

Hopefully, this information and the success I've had will inspire you to dig in to reach your goals and apply the Deep Marketing approach for your email campaigns.

Related: Why Email Marketing Is Better for Your Business Than Social Media

Deepak Kanakaraju

CEO of LearnToday.com

Deepak Kanakaraju is a digital marketing author, speaker and trainer. He has worked previously for Practo, Instamojo, Razorpay and MoEngage as a digital marketing manager. He now trains people on digital marketing and is the CEO of ed-tech platform LearnToday.com.

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