Email marketing remains a critical part of online marketing. Despite some recent negative articles and statements concerning its effectiveness, it still remains one of the most important methods of generating attention and driving traffic toward a landing page or website.
According to Attachments.me, there are 3.3 billion email accounts worldwide. That”™s a lot of email accounts ”“ and email messages. Chadwick Martin Bailey reports that although 66 percent of users under 30 rely heavily on their smartphones, they still regularly access their email ”“ just through their phone instead of a computer. We might not like email and at times might even be overwhelmed by its sheer volume and yet, we still review our messages on a regular ”“ if not frequent ”“ basis.
Effective email strategies require the segmenting or grouping of your audience. By segmenting your audience, you can provide it with the specific content it is interested in. For example, a targeted audience interested in SEO (search engine optimization) would be more interested in new marketing techniques than some article on ethics.
As analytics become more sophisticated (and pervasive), online marketers are able to better segment their audience into increasingly smaller and better-targeted groups. This allows them to provide the specific materials and information that are of interest to these groups. Providers of quality and relevant information benefit from enhanced brand recognition and are considered industry leaders. Incidentally, this is one of those oft-discussed instances where the quality of followers beats the quantity.
Here are seven basic email segmentation criteria that will help you organize your email marketing list. You can easily create additional segmentation criteria ”“ with the proviso that it is highly relevant to your market niche.
1. Location
This is particularly important if you are dealing with a geolocation business, particularly if it is a brick and mortar business such as a restaurant. For an online business, you might want to do some segmentation by country or region.
2. Age and gender
Depending on your offering, age and gender can play have a huge impact on your response. People of different ages react very differently to the same stimuli. A simple example is the divide in cellphone use for people under and over 30 years old.
3. Title
This could also refer to a level in a company ”“ say mid-management, or to a specific area such as customer support.
4. Type of business
Since you want to be as specific as possible, you can include several of the relevant characteristics of the business, including its revenue and number of employees. Many marketers consider the number of employees as the key component in determining the size of a business.
5. Previous purchases
Amazingly, previous purchases are frequently overlooked when developing a segmentation strategy. Marketers spend a lot of time evaluating new buyer characteristics while largely overlooking existing customers who are far more likely to make an additional purchase of products or services. Cart abandonment is an important area that also falls under this heading. Really sharp marketing companies such as Godaddy will often take note of an abandoned cart and contact the cart owner within two days ”“ sometimes even with a discount coupon to entice the buyer to complete their purchase.
6. Areas of interest/customer activity
This area is of particular interest to marketers since it denotes customer interest and activity including click behavior; downloaded articles and which web pages have been accessed. Surveys can also illuminate areas of interest and potential segmentation points.
7. Duration of subscription
Some companies provide initial emails and offers to new subscribers (fewer than 30 days) and special interactions for long-term subscribers. This segmentation criteria is rapidly growing in importance.
The degree of segmentation that you specify can greatly affect the results of your marketing and sales efforts. The better you target your audience, the better the result of your email and marketing campaigns.
Bruce Newman is the president of wwWebevents.com, a division of The Productivity Institute L.L.C. Newman is a social media guru and webinar production and promotion expert. He is also the creator of The Complete Webinar Training Course, an online course that helps companies create and promote highly successful webinars. Bruce can be reached at bnewman@prodinst.com.
