Rather than sending out an all-purpose marketing message that is meant for some hypothetical “average” consumer, your messaging will be more effective when you treat your audience as the special people they are. 
Segmentation enables us to be more interesting, relevant, and influential to our customers. Done right, this boosts loyalty and drives sales.
Fail!
The reason that segmentation fails for some businesses is that they tend to segment by their need, instead of by the customer’s need. That’s called email blasting. Epic Fail. Just consider: consumers have moved from TV viewing with just 4 channels to high def cable with 100’s of channels to pick from. There’s a choice of social networks, millions of websites, and possibly trillions of kitten videos on YouTube. In short, today’s consumer wants something that’s meant for them, not for everybody.
Chickens, Eggs, and Email
Familiarity is the key to customer retention, and one of the best ways to build familiarity is through email subscriptions. But is implementing email marketing strategies before you have built a subscriber list a pointless exercise? And how do you build targeted email marketing lists if you don’t yet have anything to say? It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma, but if you begin with content marketing and social networks, you’ll attract a ready-made audience of email leads who want more great content – and offers – tailored just for them. Which you’ll deliver via email.
Enough, already!
How much email is too much? That’s a reasonable concern. But the answer to that question comes back to how relevant are the messages. A quarterly email from a company that self-promotes and gives me nothing are four too many. Several emails a week with creative ideas, problem solving tips, and offers that can save me time are welcome in my inbox. Even if many of the emails don’t get opened, the exposure of your brand keeps you top of mind, making it more likely for your customers to think of you when they’re ready to buy. This is why it’s so important to segment your list so that subscribers only get emails that are meaningful for them. Here are a few ways to go about email based marketing that works: Test Everything Tweak your messages so that half of the people in a segment receive a test version, and compare the results. Keep things simple. Don’t test and compare a lot of variables within your testing framework. Test just subject lines, or test content length, or test images. But change only one variable in each test. But you say you’re pretty happy with your current results? Don’t assume that because something is working well it couldn’t work better. Why settle for a 14% click-through rate if 19% is achievable? Get DataIn order to identify clear segments you need as much data as you can get your hands on. Behavioral and transactional data are often more reliable than data that you collect through surveys; most buyers don’t want to complete a survey and most people are terrible at predicting their own behavior anyhow:
- Track purchases and look for similarities
- Track which messages are opened and clicked
- Track who is more likely to gravitate to a type of message
- Track which messages lead to purchases by which type of person.
Start Simple While you should be collecting and storing as much data as possible from the beginning, your actual segmentation process should start simple. Look for patterns in purchase behavior and look for the single most important factor, and segment by that alone. Starting simple gives you an easeir platform to measure results. What have you done to segment your lists effectively?