Holidays, events and special occasions are ideal opportunities to fine tune your messages to get more people to respond to them.
One way to refine your email messages is to use subscriber segmentation.
Segmentation tools allow you to target a group of clients who fit a specific profile. This means you can send to, for example, only men in your list who are between the ages of 25 and 30 living in the Bahamas.
Segmenting your list is vital to the long term success of email marketing campaigns. Proper list segmentation can lead to improved open rates and revenue.
Not everyone signs up to your newsletter for the same reasons; they live in different places, have different behavioral patterns and they like different products. This being the reality, marketers need to split up their lists and craft messages accordingly.
However, by comparison, segmentation is quite an advanced tool, and to do it thoroughly you will need more info from people than just their name and email address.
So to begin with, getting permission and profile and preference information from the time a person signs up would make your life a lot easier. If not you’ll be battling to segment and target your database in order to push your news to a more relevant readership.
One problem for newcomers to email marketing is that when they first start they tend to think just sending a message out to as many people as possible will be the best way to get results; when in fact targeting smaller groups of people actually produces a much higher return on investment.
Just like putting all your strawberries together in a basket would make perfect sense if you're a fruit merchant, grouping subscribers according to their characteristics makes your mailing list more
orderly, useful and easier to manage.
Suppose that you could create two or three different offers that would appeal to different groups of your subscribers, depending on their needs, wants, interests and objections. The more relevant an offer is, the more likely someone is to take you up on that offer.
But don’t fret if don’t have much to start with - just use what you have and build it up from there.
GraphicMail has made segmentation for first-timers easy:
1) Just log into the application and go to “Lists and Contacts”.
2) Halfway down the screen on the left side you’ll see the segmentation section. Click on the “+” button to create a new segmented list.
3) A pop-up screen will appear titled "Create new smart list."
4) The first thing is to select your dataset to capture information from. In other words, here you choose which address book or collection of contacts you’ll be segmenting from. So, for example, if all your readers on the West Coast of America are already signed up to one list, you could select that dataset if it’s what you need - instead of dealing with your entire contacts database.
5) More advanced users can also search for contacts that have similar properties from an existing list. In other words, refine an existing segment.
Not sure about these instructions? Watch our helpful segmentation video here for some extra guidelines.
6) Below this section there are a few fields where you specify the details that the subscribers in your segment should have in common. For starters there are 5 available query fields, but you can always add more. Some of the basic criteria include first names, last names, occupation, industry, location, and so on.
7) When you’re done setting the criteria, store your results by giving your Smart List a name (Tip: make it something logical, according to segment – like “West Coast truck owners) and clicking "save"
And that's it! Now you can see your apples from your oranges and you'll have a new segment to select whenever you’re sending out an email newsletter.
Finally, remember that no segment is set in stone. You can always add or remove subscribers, refine an existing one or just start from scratch.
