Hyperlocal Email Marketing + CRM: The Perfect Match?

Email continues to surpass other digital marketing channels not only in terms of its high ROI but also as the customers’ preferred mode of communication. As much as 73% of the millennials prefer emails when it comes to communicating with a business. When it comes to receiving communications from retailers, the table below says it all:

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Given that email marketing is a relatively low-cost and low-maintenance channel, it accords businesses – irrespective of their size of operations and financial means – an opportunity to reach out to a vast pool of target audience. However, thanks to the possibility of leveraging pointed data insights to craft email messages, personalization has become a base expectation among the consumers.

That’s exactly what hyperlocal email marketing delivers on. Using CRM (customer relationship marketing) tools to drive your marketing messaging and strategy helps to dodge the bullet of non-contextual emails, the tolerance for which is fast declining.

Why Hyperlocal Email Marketing Is Important

How many times in a day do you check your email? Out of these, how many times do you use a desktop or laptop to open and read emails? According to a report, 75% of consumers open their emails on mobile devices.

As smartphones evolve into state-of-being extensions rather than mere devices, it allows marketers to build upon email marketing ROI by not just creating responsive emails but ones that can be tweaked as per a user’s location.

Hyperlocal marketing that facilitates location-based targeting of the audience for your email outreach helps you do just that. This means instead of creating a single message to reach out to everyone in the area your business operates, you target only those to whom your services will be most relevant.

While these hyperlocal marketing ideas narrow down the scope of your email marketing outreach, it is known to drive better conversions by helping you reach out to people to whom your products or services are most relevant. As per research by Google, there has been a 500% increase in location-specific searches between 2016 and 2018. It thus makes sense to align your email marketing initiative with this trend.

Your CRM system can bring you greater success with this strategy. The data insights from your CRM – that include details such as age, gender, purchase and browsing history, and location – can be an asset for creating tailored emails that resonate with prospective buyers’ inclination to buy access products/services in their vicinity.

7 Ways CRM Can Help You Make the Most of Hyperlocal Email Marketing

Your CRM platform can help you target leads more efficiently by aiding audience segmentation, offering greater personalization, and nurturing long-term customer relations. Here are 7 hyperlocal marketing ideas in which CRM can prove effective in aiding your email strategy:

1. Segmenting Your Target Audience

One of the most powerful hyperlocal marketing tips is to segment your audience. After all, the entire personalization approach rests on handpicking the recipients to whom your products would be most relevant and structuring your message in a way that resonates best with them. Your CRM system not just makes the audience segmentation easier but also more targeted.

By using the right filters, you can divide your potential user base into different categories based on their locations. This includes their place of residence, place of work, the neighborhoods they frequent the most as well as the most traveled routes used for daily commutes.

For example, emails with targeted local updates can be shared with customers based on their vicinity.

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In another example, let’s say you run a coffee chain and have opened an outlet at a new location. Using geo-targeting, you can reach out to your subscribers saying, ‘Now, your morning cuppa comes without a detour. We’re open at ‘address’.’

2. Real-time Updates for High Click-through Rates

An email marketing campaign can yield better results when you make it easier for your customers to find you. If you are a retail business announcing an end-of-season sale, including a dynamic map in the email that tells your recipients the nearest store location will give them that extra nudge to explore your offering when they’re in the vicinity of your business outlet. For instance, the example below depicts how regular updates can be shared in real-time to increase the foot traffic in a new store.

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With CRM, you can automate this process without losing on the element of personalization. For instance, the dynamic map can reflect different store locations to a subscriber depending on whether they’re accessing it from their home, office, or some other place.

Such real-time updates in the email content can drive up the click-through rates, engagements, and in effect, your hyperlocal sales.

3. Feedback-based Messaging

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Your CRM system is a key link that connects you to your customers and develops a deeper understanding of their needs and preferences. This database of customer communications can be a goldmine for insights on which to base your email marketing messaging.

For instance, in this email, a quiz is being used to gauge subscribers’ mood and suggest them a suitable class option. Not only is a quiz a fun way to engage your subscribers but also helps you make pointedly accurate suggestions, based on their inputs. You can, then, create a targeted email campaign around their preferred choices, building their anticipation by telling and stoking their intent to enroll. By announcing a special discount or a promo discount, you can give them a final nudge to go through with their decision.

You can curate unique messages for different areas to cater to consumers’ expectations, needs, and wants. And, in the process, driving up sales across the board.

4. Curating Targeted Offers

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Hyper-localization isn’t just about knowing where your subscribers live but also understanding their lifestyle and cultural references. This helps you curate targeted content and offers that they can relate to.

If you are a business with a multinational presence, you must make sure that you use the right references when speaking to your subscribers. For instance, in the email above, CRM data pertaining to past activity and current location is being leveraged to make relevant and personalized pitch. Your CRM can help you identify where a subscriber is based and use an email template that facilitates automatic currency conversions on the basis of their location.

5. Building Localized Outreach

A hyperlocal approach, be it in marketing or business operations, is all about thinking global but acting local. That’s why most websites today have a multilingual presence. But does your email marketing complement this ethos? If not, are you sure that your messages are having the intended impact of consumers in overseas markets?

Imagine if H&M, a Sweden-based clothing brand, crafted its email content only in the native language. Or all of Volkswagen’s email marketing was done in German. Knowing your audience’s preferred language is essential for building localized outreach.

Using your CRM insights such as zip codes, IP geolocation, mobile country codes, you can recreate the same email template design in different languages for different audience segments.

6. Better Lead Nurturing

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Once you have captured leads through your submission form, it is important to nurture them the right way through targeted email campaigns. Where your CTA leads a prospective buyer plays a decisive role in building trust and confidence. The way to make this count is hyper-localizing your landing pages as well.

A new visitor or potential customer landing on your website through your email is far more likely to trust you when they see that you understand their neighborhood, their cultural references, their lifestyle. This can be achieved by simply analyzing your CRM data to see where a majority of your existing or prospective customers live and sending them a personalized welcome email (as depicted in the example above).

7. Effective Email Automation

Automation is a key element of effective email marketing. With HTML email templates, you can pre-write email content and send them out at the most opportune moments or on certain triggers. Your CRM can play an important role in making sure that not just the timing but also the content and messaging of your automated emails is perfect.

For instance, welcome emails, cart abandonment emails, re-engagement campaigns and so on can be automated for different location-based segments of buyers based on their past purchases history and feedback.

Consider the case of the email below that, once set up, can be automated based on the location of the readers.

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The Takeaway

Creating hyperlocal content that does the job of striking a chord with the audience is not the easiest marketing technique. It requires interaction from your consumer base along with the effective use of technology and data insights. Whether you’re a global brand or an upcoming startup, internalizing such targeted messaging your email campaigns won’t happen overnight.

It’s a work in progress that yields the best results with consistent efforts. The best approach to optimize this initiative is to hire a dedicated email campaign manager and let them build up your marketing strategy with sensitivity, patience, and understanding of local lifestyle, culture, and customs.

At Email Uplers, we bring exactly this to the table. With expert email marketing support, we help you curate engaging email campaigns that can convert leads for you at scale in even the trickiest marketing scenarios. Learn more here.