Email Marketing Tip of the Week – Segmentation and Targeting

This week’s email marketing tip is going to help you out with email target marketing. One of the secrets to success that most beginners don’t understand is that segmenting your list into smaller, more focused lists, produces far improved results. It allows many benefits over having one massive list, including the ability to experiment, deliver customized content and much more.

Reasons to Segment Your List

1. Compare strategy success – If you breakdown your list into targeted email marketing groups, you’ll be able to try out different strategies and compare the success of one another. Divide your group randomly into three smaller sections. Send out different versions of the same newsletter to each group, featuring perhaps different calls to action or different designs. Keep track of the click through and conversion rates and apply the principles of the email that worked the best from now on.

2. Customize your content – The purpose behind email target marketing is that you want to be able to provide the most personalized and customized message that you can to each member on your list. Somebody on California probably doesn’t care that your store in Pennsylvania is having a blowout sale this weekend. An individual household member probably won’t care that you’re offering 25% on all weekly fulfillment orders that exceed $2,000. The name of the game is sending out your messages to people who will be receptive to them.

3. Set upfront guidelines to keep list members happy - One of the most important takeaways for this week’s email marketing tip should be this: your email list members will be happier and more satisfied if you set upfront guidelines for the content they will be receiving. Give new signups the option to select the categories of messages they want to receive, whether its promotions, new products, newsletters or anything else. List members who can select the information they are going to receive will naturally respond better to those messages. Plus, they did the hard work of segmenting your list for you!

Ways to Segment Your List

• Geographic location
• Age
• Household/business
• Type of information requested
• Previous response history
• Prospects/previous customers
• Purchasing history
• Any variable that will help you deliver more specialized and targeted email marketing messages to your list members

If you get started putting this email marketing tip to work now, your results will begin to improve immediately. A segmented list that allows you to achieve email target marketing will be vastly more successful than a generic, one size fits all list.

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