What’s Your Email EQ

A person’s intelligence quotient, or IQ, can help with understanding complex math problems or making the right decisions on a standardized test. Psychologists are now just as interested in EQ, or emotional intelligence quotient, to discover how people understand how to navigate social situations such as business meetings, collaborative work, parties – and yes, marketing interactions. People with a high EQ experience empathy, are sensitive to others’ social cues, and are great motivators.

These traits are important on a personal level, but they also relate directly to your email marketing. Great email marketing campaigns motivate recipients to click through and use good audience segmentation and personalization to deliver what an audience truly wants. When marketers talk about selling with emotion, we don’t just mean triggering B2C impulse buys. Emotional intelligence also has a dramatic impact on carefully planned B2B sales too.

Here’s how to raise your email EQ to genius level with marketing automation and great copy.

Reading Behavior – Understanding Your Audience

Nothing else will raise your marketing EQ as much as gaining a good, thorough understanding of your audience. With audience segmentation driven by a marketing automation system that tracks behavioral data as well as demographic and firmographic information, you get a more nuanced picture of your audience and can easily group individual recipients into audience segments.

Think of being at a party and talking to the people you meet there. You’re going to ask a few casual questions, such as “How do you know the host?” or “What do you do for fun?” so you can find topics your conversation partner enjoys. The data you collect about your email audience serves the same purpose, giving you insight into who they are so your future conversations with them have greater relevance.

Keep this advice in mind when designing subscription forms; asking for specifics beyond a name and an email address will pay dividends later as you’re able to establish a stronger relationship with your email recipients. For list rentals, make sure you’re getting clean data in segmented lists that let you select your audiences.

Empathy – Filling Your Prospects’ Needs

Let’s go back to that party analogy to understand how much empathy matters when developing a more emotionally intelligent email marketing campaign. How much more at ease do you feel when you’re at a party full of people you already know you have something in common with versus one in which you don’t know anyone? Your audience likewise feels more at ease when they know they’re talking to someone who shares their interests and can talk about them with some degree of knowledge.

In your email marketing, you have the chance to know your audience’s needs and address them specifically. Marketing automation gives you the power to go even farther to meet your prospects’ needs by customizing graphics, text and links to answer their questions precisely. By making solutions specific instead of generic by personalizing email, you do a better job of empathizing with your customers’ concerns – and empathy is at the heart of EQ.

Motivation – Giving Your Audience Reasons to Act

Great leaders get that way because they’re able to inspire others to follow without having to push. When you motivate your potential buyers with information they need to know wrapped in custom graphics and copy that reaches them personally, you don’t need a hard sell. Keeping your call to action clean, concise and powerful depends on letting the rest of your message sell your audience – yet without the need for a hard sell. Here’s where your content team can shine by putting together customized email messages that inform and persuade. Marketing automation plays an important part again, helping you and your marketing firm keep cross-channel promotions organized and content relevant.