The Do’s & Don’ts of Email Segmentation – Making Email Lists Work For You

Apr. 18, 2013 by Angela Cheong

Weekly Email Marketing News Digest

On this week’s edition of the email marketing news digest we’re looking at what the experts have to say on the do’s and don’ts of email segmentation. We present the views, so you can do your own testing to see what works best for your business! And for the email segmentation experts out there, we’ve kept it diversified with tips from mobile marketing and study results on the industry performance of email marketing.

7 simple and effective ways to use email segmentation

Targeting increases relevance, which in turn boosts customer engagement leading to increased email clicks and open rates. Targeting is achieved through segmentation and here are 7 ways to segment an email list:

Gender
Geotargeting
Age
Automated triggers
Purchase data
Activity
Customer Preferences

Break These Email Segmentation Best Practices

While the previous article gives a good overview of basic email segmentation practices, Jordie van Rijn provides examples where it’s okay to make an exception, or to go one step further in ensuring your email is both relevant and targeted.

Early segmentation – Sometimes it’s best to put off collecting customer preferences to make email sign-up less painful. Instead, go for a customer preference center.
Age & behavior – Don’t make assumptions about age group. For example, just because you are targeting baby boomers doesn’t mean you don’t need an email that is optimized for mobile.
Gender segmentation – Remember that during the season of giving, people might purchase something on your site for the opposite gender as a gift.
Geographic location – Rethink the way you present content to a national audience if you segment by geography. Be creative!

Using Mobile Marketing Tactics to Add Email Subscribers

Couple of weeks back we featured an article on how you can improve email deliverability through SEO tactics. Now we’re letting mobile marketing teach us a few new tricks. Get users to opt in to receiving email through text by:

Asking them
Offering incentives
Opt-ins within mobile apps
Point-of-Sale
Customer review
Captive audiences
Short codes
QR codes

We’re all about multi-channel these days so we might as well apply that to our marketing tactics as well!

5 Ways to Personalize Emails and Enhance Open Rates

Our client Eloqua has gathered data revealing that personalized subject lines are key to open rates. Email subject lines that contain the name and one other personal detail perform the best.