Adjusting your email cadence and content to your ICP

Email frequency according to the Ideal Customer Profile

It is important to consider your Ideal Customer Profile when determining an appropriate frequency for emails. Factors like how familiar they are with email, their communication preferences, and the types of products they’re likely to buy should all be considered.

After you have identified your target audience, you should tailor the frequency of your emails accordingly — if they are expected to convert quickly or if they are expected to make a long-term purchase decision, then use higher-frequency emails. However, if it’s less likely that customers will respond quickly or if their buying process is more complex, then a lower email frequency may be more suitable.

Let’s take an example for the B2B industry. B2B Sales is now done 94% of the time through multichannel and email is still the first channel of choice for sales teams. 

Knowing that as a fact, you could confidently craft your email sequence with multiple follow-up emails and actions to cover the buyer’s journey of a typical b2b potential. 

However, we must know where the line is crossing between crafting a successful email sequence with multiple follow-ups and a spammy email sequence that will only have a negative effect on your prospecting. 

You don’t want to harass people just because they are used to getting hundreds of emails per day in their inbox.

On the other hand, we have the example of the B2C industry, when the prospect actually benefits from getting info and promotion of new products, offers, and discounts every day. If you have a subscribed potential you can easily send an email per day, each day of the week (weekends work here also) throughout an entire month and still have a highly converting email sequence.

A most extreme case and an opposite one to the B2C are specific industries like health, where you can’t just go and “spam” doctors and health workers with cold sales emails. 

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do email outreach to these types of industries, you just need to adjust your emails to your customer profile. People in these industries are not used to receiving constant offers and emails, outside of their business communication, and they use email as a channel for important decision-making. 

So, you could once in a while check with someone from these industries if there is interest in your offering, just make sure to be straightforward, adjust your tone, and keep the follow-ups to a minimum.

Email Content optimization according to your Ideal Customer Profile

Of course, one size does not fit all.

Email content optimization is critical for any successful email sequence strategy. By understanding your Ideal Customer Profile, you can personalize and target your content to the right prospects, ensuring that they receive relevant and appealing emails.

This means tailoring the subject line, preheader, body copy, visuals, etc., customized to attract this particular ICP segment and drive conversions. Additionally, by relying on user data in-app such as demographics, psychographics, online behavior, activity types, and attributes of their past purchases or interactions, you can create more engaging content and better conversion rates.

Let’s see how to successfully match your email content to your ICP each time.

1. Pain points

Each potential customer has a pain point that your service could potentially solve. It’s only your task to find it. Doing good research on the industry they work in, the demographic segmentation, and the web technologies they use you can create one very specific ICP and find a pain point you can target. Having the pain point in mind you can have the aim of your email sequence and base the content upon it.

For example, a real estate company offers facility space for its clients. They will start by looking into the size of the company and the location to match their ICP first. After their ICP is matched, they need to find a specific pain point of these companies to “present” themselves as a solution to in their email sequence. A potential pain point of such ICP is spending too much time manually researching facility offers and not being able to find the right size of space for their needs. What the value proposition of the real estate company here would be is offering a 1 on 1 matching of facility spaces according to their location, needs, and pricing point.

You wrap that up in a nice 3-5 email sequence giving the facts, showcasing direct examples with visuals and you got yourself a potential customer.

2. Visuals

Not each ICP is accustomed to the same visual representation. Think of it as showing a meme to toddlers. Some of them might laugh, some of them might get confused, some might get angry for not understanding it, and the rest might not even pay attention to it at all. 

It’s the same with your ICP. Visuals representing political figures, generation-related and demographic content, and nation and location-specific representation might be a great miss to your email sequence, as they fit a fraction of your ICP but not your entire prospecting list.

So, make sure you are neutral and on the safe side with the visuals.

3. Wording

You might fit the pain point, and you might as well find the perfect visual to showcase it, but if your wording is not spot-on, it can totally ruin the success of your email sequence. 

Imagine explaining inflation to 10-year-olds… They won’t get it if you start explaining about the economy, the resource crises, and the industry collapse, but if you give them a direct example that their bicycle got now more expensive because we are lacking materials to make the tires they might just understand the value. 

Think of it when you are writing your email sequence to your IPC. Stay away from specific industry words that might not be familiar to them, simplify the meaning by using common terminology, and cut off complex and long sentences into a clear statement. Explain it as you would to a 10-year-old.

Adjusting CTAs to your Ideal customer profile

Adjusting your call-to-actions (CTAs) to fit the needs of your ideal customer profile is a keystone in any successful email sequence. By customizing the prompt and word choice for CTAs, you are showing potential customers that their concerns or interests will be met if they click on the “button”.

Additionally, CTAs tailored to specific customer profiles can help guide visitors down the funnel, leading them to complete conversions quicker and more often.

Now,  a common thought is that a CTA needs to be button-like and each needs to lead up to a direct conversion.

CTAs for cold email outreach and email sequences are more than just buttons. With your CTA you are leading the prospect to the next follow-up email or the next stage of the awareness funnel, so using just buttons, or links might not be enough. 

A possible CTA can be a question, or just an invitation to book a call. Of course, you would also want to time the CTAs according to your email sequence where you can go with a bit more “aggressive” CTAs by the middle of your sequence and then loosen it back up by the end of it. 

For example, you can start by just asking a question in your first one, to avoid being pushy and looking like you are throwing them a sales pitch. Next, you can add a link to some materials you want to share with them followed by a direct booking, or registration or even purchase CTA in your next one. Coming to the end of the sequence, if there is no interest, you can go back to a question for referral to another person and just tell them that they can reach out back to you when they have time to discuss things further.

Wrapping up

Crafting tailored email content based on your ideal customer profile (ICP) is one of the most effective ways that you can use to grow your client list and increase engagement. You can use ICP data such as job titles, industry, or location to craft content that appeals to each specific customer segment. This ensures that you are speaking directly to them and increases the likelihood of them reading and engaging with your content, ultimately leading to more conversions from your emails.

Adjusting your emails to personas helps ensure that each segment or group within that company’s wider audience gets relevant content suited just for them.