Say good-bye to One Size Fits All mailings

In my last posting I covered how to ask your email subscribers for more than just their address. I understand that collecting information retroactively can be tough, but no matter whether you’ve been able to collect more than an email address from the get-go or not, it’s important to think about segmenting your database to send relevant information.

What am I, just an address to you?!
You should really want to have a deeper relationship with your list members, which is why you should collect (or ask for retroactively) more information from your subscribers than their email address.

If you only have an email address for your subscribers, you’re taking the “spray and pray” approach. You’re sending the same message to the masses and praying that it’ll be well received. But that’s most likely to be a waste of your time and resources. (This will work for general company updates, i.e. “everything is on sale” or “We’re moving” notices.)

The objective of segmenting your email list members is to increase the relevancy of your messages so that they add more value to your members. This makes your messages a welcome addition to their inbox – builds a good brand awareness for you and improves your reputation with your ESP (fewer spam complaints is good thing).

Moving beyond one size fits all
To segment your the list for your email campaign, split your email list into groups, where each group has some shared characteristic(s). Then you tailor your campaign to each group, with email content, timing and frequency reflecting those shared characteristics.

Still not sure how to segment your list? Here are some ideas:

1. Prospects and clients:

For service providers, someone who’s made a purchase shouldn’t receive the same information as someone who’s still making the purchase decision. Once an email list member has become a client, it’s time to re-classify them so they receive emails that are designed for clients and not prospects. There is nothing that can create more cognitive dissonance than for an existing client to receive an email marketing to them as if they were a prospect offering a better deal than they just received.

2. Demographics:

Too many marketers still fail to leverage the data they collect, such as gender and birthdate. Other demographics might include education levels, occupation, location of residence, marital status, number of children, income or other socio-economic factors. Birthdays are great opportunity to mix up your messaging to an email subscriber and give a non-sale oriented, warm and fuzzy to build trust and enthusiasm with your brand and email program. Only ask for demographic information that’s relevant to your business’s objectives.

“Demographics” is not to be confused with “Psychographics” or the identification of certain characteristics that your clients have that would influence their buying decisions. These could be factors that include measuring their attitudes, interests, opinions, cultural identity, etc.

3. Open rate or CTR rates:

Open rates are inherently inaccurate, so this isn’t one that I’d recommend highly. But, it’s worthwhile to keep in mind that email list members that open your newsletter or click on something on a frequent basis are clearly more engaged than members who do not click on things… therefore, you can test sending a higher frequency to your most engaged members to increase conversion or response. Because of the wonky nature of open rates, some of these followup campaigns may be perceived as pesky duplicates to some recipients.

4. Acquisition Channels:

Where your email members came from is known as an ‘acquisition channel’ and different acquisition channels have different characteristics. Example: Co-registration email list members will always respond or convert differently than organically acquired email members.

5. Geography:

Your prospects or clients in a foreign country really don’t want to hear about your domestic holiday chit chat. And sending your email for a morning special that arrives in your recipient’s inbox at lunchtime because you’ve forgotten about the time zone difference isn’t very helpful either. Why waste resources sending an email to someone who’s geographically undesirable to the point of your message?

6. Interest-based preferences:

If you’ve done surveys over the past year, then you know certain email members have different interests that can help you classify their interest levels in various offerings related to your core product or service.

7. Product lines purchased:

If your firm has a wide line of distinct product lines, it’s best to address your prospects and clients by product line. Give this segment specific offers or content relevant to the product line they are interested in or purchased.

8. Major clients:

VIP clients need to be acknowledged, remembered and given better attention, gifts of exclusive information / content and some of your best deals.

9. Most recent activity:

If you have transactional customers who only purchase your type of product once every X weeks/months/years, it would be wise to segment this type of buyer so that the moment you identify their recent visit or click of a specific campaign, they would be the perfect target for increased attention and offers vs. other times in this type of customer buying cycle.

Anything that lifts the relevancy of your message lifts responses and protects against email fatigue is a good thing – and segmenting your database list will do just that. Questions? Be sure to contact me or leave a comment on this blog post and I’d be happy to talk with you about this topic.