What three questions about email marketing would you like answered? Perhaps 'What is the best Subject Line?' Or maybe, 'How can we improve Open Rates?' Then again another popular one is 'What can I do to generate more click through?'
There is one answer which applies to all: segment you email marketing list. Or rather, segment them again and again. Let us start at the beginning.
If you are new to email marketing you might think that you can leave segmenting to later. It is clear from research that you should start as soon as you can, even from a few hundred. Every little bit helps as every little bit is a bigger ROI.
You might well do it already without realising it. If you sell clothing, you would probably send certain offers to women and others to men. If you have a large range, there might be differences in age to cater for.
If a customer has bought walking boots, you might well consider lighter outer garments around early spring.
If one of your customers clicked through on your website or e-newsletter to the technical specification of a product you sell but didn't buy then you might consider an offer on that specific item, or perhaps a similar one with more features, or even one slightly cheaper.
That is basic segmentation and the three examples above show examples of the three main types of information you can use to segment an email list: Demographics, Interests and Behaviour.
They are rather crude. However, they can be used to refine segmentation to a very high level. Let's take a simple example:
You sell holidays. You concentrate on a certain destination but have a selection of accommodation to suite all tastes. You are about to start your Christmas campaign and are considering sending all those over 45 details of hotels.
However, if they recently went on a safari, you might consider limiting the options to locations that have swimming pools, tennis courts or maybe golf courses. Offering a restricted choice, but of items specific to the person gives a much better ROI.
Stacking the categories one on top of the other gives you the ability to target your email marketing campaigns even with limited information.
