How to Do Email Marketing Effectively, Part 3

Segmenting an email marketing list is essential to email marketing best practices. Customization and personalization on a mass level is one of the great benefits of using email marketing (in fact, it's the only digital marketing channel that allows for personalization on such a large scale). Consumers want personalization, and this is a fabulous way for you to offer it, without a lot of fuss. It pays off for you too--your readers will be more engaged, unsubscribes will be fewer, and your efforts will lead to more conversions.  When email recipients know they are only receiving communications with information that is relevant to their likes, tastes and interests, they are much more likely to pay attention. Think about regular mail--you're much more excited to see a card from Grandma than a piece of junk mail trying to sell you auto insurance you don't need.

A recent post from the Bronto Blog couldn't have explained email segmentation better. I'd like to share their post below. ;)

Keys to Creating More Relevant Emails with 4 Simple Segmentation Tactics

The Democratic and Republican National Conventions recently came to a close. Imagine if instead of having the Democrats attend the DNC and the Republicans attend the RNC they instead randomly assigned people to attend one or the other. Of course some people would find the convention relevant to them, but others would not. This wouldn’t make much sense, right? Well, this is exactly what you do when you send batch-and-blast emails to your subscribers.

Email marketers and politicians both know the value of sending people messages most relevant to them. Relevant emails generate higher open rates, higher click rates and, most importantly, higher conversions.

Although it all sounds great and you want to do it, what if you simply don’t have all the traditional RFM data at your fingertips? What if your company is smaller in size and/or your resources are limited? The good news is there are still ways to begin to create more relevant emails and increase revenue without a complex email marketing infrastructure. Your subscribers are handing over valuable information explicity (through a sign-up form, preference center) and implicity (through behavior within an email). For more ways to explore how to continue to grow that data bank, check out "Segmentation: What they tell you explicitly - Preferences 101"

Visit the Bronto Blog to look at some ways you can use simple segmentation data without being overwhelmed.