Effective Email Marketing: Segment Your Audience

Effective Email Marketing Tactics

Effective email marketing begins with list segmentation.

According to a MarketingSherpa study, 61% of B2C email marketers have seen favorable results delivering content relevant to specific audience segments.

Creating niche content for niche segments of your list isn’t easy. Question #1: Do you even segment your list? If not, here are some tips.

Email List Segmentation Best Practices

  • Use your email sign-up forms to collect user-preferences and profile data.
  • Focus on behavioral segmentation (What types of products do you like? What content formats do you prefer? Etc.) vs demographic data (age, sex, income, etc.) Research has shown that, in many cases, behavioral targeting has a higher conversion rate.
  • Don’t overwhelm users. Ask a few questions when they sign up. Follow up later with an “Updating Your Profile” email, maybe even via autoresponder.
  • Segment on past behavior as well as user input. Users who opened your last email are one list, users who didn’t are another. Users who clicked on a link in your last email message are another segment altogether. Clicks, pageviews, and purchases are all part of a user’s data, and make for useful email list segmentation points.

Creating Relevant Content for Niche Segments

  • Ask them. Seriously. Is there a better way to determine what content a subset of your subscribers wants?
  • Speak their language, but don’t imitate their voice. Attempting to sound too much like the segment you’re speaking to comes across as contrived and intrusive.
  • Listen. This old-but-reliable advice holds up. Social media monitoring tools make it easier than ever to detect an emerging information need.
  • Remember to include a call-to-action. It always amazes me when a marketer forgets to include a call-to-action, or buries it deep in a message.
  • Create custom landing pages. If you go to the trouble to segment your list and to create targeted ad/email copy, why would you drive all your cattle customers to the same generic landing page? Make your landing pages personal, relevant, social-ready — and targeted!

Outsourcing Content Creation for Targeted Lists

Your marketing department took a hit in the recession, didn’t it? Where once you had a marketing team, now you have a marketing person. Or worse yet, you’re doing it all yourself. You need help. But where do you turn?

Outsourcing PR and marketing is a good way to create the steady flow of content you need. If you’re smart, you repurpose content for email, presentations, a blog and other social media outposts. If you’re going to invest in anything, investing in high-quality, creative, relevant content is a good place to start.