We must accept one point: everyone is an individual. It’s impossible to decant them into specific compartments. Segmenting your email marketing lists is not simple, but can be accurate and worthwhile.

I’ve often referred to the old-time sales staff who would be in face-to-face contact with the customer, and have used their techniques as an example of what we could usefully ape. I am in awe of them. I did a little bit of sales and what it proved to me was that the job was exceptionally difficult and open to error.

It’s the acting that floors me. Sales staff alter their approach depending on their customer and will change from one style to another seamlessly. It’s impressive to see. The options they have to choose from include: empathy, kindly, friend, responsible adult, authoritarian, pleading failure (that, surprisingly, worked) and, particularly memorable, was a well briefed, intelligent authority who was open to discussion on all points. That last one worked with a customer who came in surrounded by barriers, but his feelings of impregnability were his downfall as he believed himself untouchable. Big mistake.

Sales staff respond to customers by way of a funnel. At first they make a few assumptions and concentrate on gaining information in order to broadly ‘type’ the customer. They would prod then gauge their responses. They’d go in gently, looking for reactions, and progressively build up a picture of the person in their mind. A mistake here or there was no problem as it was indicative of where not to go.

At the end of the process they would have, in effect, put the customer into a segmented email marketing list.

We have one particular disadvantage when compared to face-to-face sales; we are not face-to-face. Our advantages significantly outweigh this one point as we can build up a database over time with our returns. What we have to do is to moderate our response depending on our experiences and treat that person in the manner required. In other words, the difference between one subscriber and another is what type of sales person the marketing email requires us to be.