Email Marketing Blog

This is the first in a 3-part series this month about email segmentation. Today, you’ll learn what segmentation is and why you may wish to use it in your email marketing. Next, we’ll talk about ways to segment your list. The final part of the series will review some common segmentation categories to consider for your list.

Why Should I Segment My Email Messages?

Let’s assume you have written an ebook and developed a web site about buying foreclosed property. Your prospects have opted-in; your subscriber numbers are growing day-by-day, and then…

… you start losing people faster than a skunk at a garden party.

If your readers don’t feel you are talking to them, they’ll go elsewhere. Nobody likes to feel ignored.

In the post, “The #1 Tip for Writing Successful Emails”, we looked at defining our prospect and writing emails directly to that person. That’s the first step.

As your list grows, your readership becomes more diverse (unless you are in a very narrowly defined niche that would only appeal to a very small segment of the population in the first place).

Take our buying foreclosed property example. Those reading your emails might include:

• First-time home buyers looking for affordable housing;
• Renters who are tired of throwing their rent money away;
• Females worried about being “taken” in property purchases;
• New and experienced home flippers;
• Investors looking to buy property low in order to sell high;
• Investors with a rental portfolio;
• Baby-boomers looking for an affordable second home.

Wouldn’t you agree that these readers probably have varied areas of interest, backgrounds, incomes, educations, etc.?

One “personalized” email campaign cannot be all things to all people. The money from your list comes from your readers sitting back and saying, “This person really understands what I’m going through - my frustrations and my goals. I think I’ll follow their advice.”

By segmenting your list, it allows you to speak directly to the first-time home buyer. You can touch on the difficulty of finding affordable property and the frustration of settling for much less than you’d like because that’s all you can afford.

This varies tremendously to educating a real estate investor on the benefits of buying foreclosed property. For one thing, an investor probably has funding available, while the first-time home buyer is scraping a down-payment together. The investor wants to buy low and sell high and is primarily interested in the ROI of a property in which (s)he will never reside. The first-time home owner wants a HOME in which to live and, perhaps, to raise a family.

Two totally different conversations, wouldn’t you agree?

In the next part of this series, I’ll share some simple ways to segment your lists. And, finally, I’ll throw out some segmentation categories for your consideration.

If you have any questions or comments, please add them below and we’ll include them in the series.

Debbi Bressler
Email Specialist
Get Response

On Saturday, I will be celebrating my birthday. What does that have to do with email marketing? Plenty!

I’m now on the “mature” side of life :). And what may have worked years ago doesn’t necessarily work today.

The kiss of death online - with things changing at the speed of light - is to appear old and dated. As the years go by, you can’t afford to let yourself go or your business could soon be gone.

Reminds me of a commercial where a mom is talking to her kids and their friends and says, “Let’s get jiggy with it”. They all shake their heads before informing mom that “Nobody says jiggy anymore!”

So….take a moment to make sure your autoresponder messages aren’t jiggy.

Many people write a series of autoresponder messages, load them into their GetResponse system, and leave it at that. They’re still sending emails to their list warning them about the millennium bug that will take place when the clock strikes 12:00 pm on December 31, 1999!

Just like going through your closets once a year and throwing out what no longer works for you, you need to go through your autoresponder messages and check the following:

- Is the language still current? This is especially important if you have slang in your emails.

- Are the programs you are promoting in your emails still the best? Or even still around?

- Do your emails include references to dates or news events that will pinpoint how old your messages are?

- Do the links in your emails still work?

- Does your copy refer to Version 1 of a product that is now on Version 4?

- If you quote pricing in your messages, does this reflect current pricing?

This is a perfect time of year to give your messages an overhaul. Why not put them on your to-do list today?!

Debbi Bressler
Email Marketing Specialist
GetResponse

If you are new to writing email campaigns or if success has eluded you, I’d like to share my #1 tip for writing emails. The best part is that you don’t have to be gifted in order for this to be effective.

The first thing to do is identify your customer. Is this person a man or woman? Age? Education? Location? Marital Status? Children? Why did they sign up to your list? Have they purchased from you yet?

Now, develop your customer in your mind’s eye. Picture them sitting across from you at the kitchen table as you share your news with them.

Write your email to this ONE person. “Speak” your email to John or Jane Doe. Picture how they would react. Would they understand the terminology you are using? Is this something they would be interested in? Why?

Yes, there are many successful “wham, bam, thank you m’am” marketers out there. I’m sure many of them are successful.

But I’ve never been one to go for the one-shot deal. I like to get to know my readers and want them to know me…as a minimum to give them reassurance that I’m a real person with their best interests at heart. They know that I would never recommend products or services unless they were beneficial.

Is this effective? Well, not too long ago I emailed one of my lists about a product that was well-suited to their experience level and interests. The conversion rate at my affiliate site was 45.7%. And this was for a $397 product.

Because of my personal style, I often have people respond to my email campaigns, thinking it is a personal, one-on-one email sent from me to them. People like to do business with people they like.

Try this out for yourself and share your results here!

Debbi Bressler
Email Marketing Specialist
GetResponse

DIRECT MAGAZINE recently held an e-mail roundtable among some e-mailers, and asked what they felt had the biggest impact on the industry.

The answer?  How to improve message deliverability.

Some interesting things mentioned were:

• Using multichannel integration.

• Behavior-based targeting.

• List segmentation and why you should use it.

• Why reputation is critical for email deliverability.

• Program approach vs. campaign approach.

Read the full article here.

Debbi Bressler
Email Marketing Specialist
GetResponse

Email marketing can be profitable for any business, no matter what kind of product or service you are selling. It is significantly cheaper than other advertising methods and it enables you to build credibility with your subscribers. As a result, you can generate more sales and profits.

The foundation of email marketing is a targeted, responsive and permission-based email list. If you have a list of subscribers that trust you and consider you to be an expert in the field of your interest, you are on the right track.

Below you will several list building ideas that will help you make the most out of your email marketing.

1. Provide useful, relevant and unique content. Your visitors will not give you their email address just because they can subscribe to your newsletter free of charge. You have to provide unique and valuable information that will be useful for your subscribers.
2. Add a subscription form to every page of your website. Make it elegant and accessible. Locate it at the top-left corner of your site, as that’s where the human eye will initially travel.
3. Make the sign up process as easy as possible. You shouldn’t ask for too much information upfront, because you will lose subscribers.  Collecting just the name and email address should be enough for most email marketing campaigns.
4. Address your visitors’ privacy concerns. Most people are worried that they will receive spam after giving out their email address. Tell your potential subscribers that you respect their privacy and link this statement to a privacy policy page.
5. Show an example issue to your visitors. This lets your potential subscribers review your newsletter before they sign up and determine if it is something they’d be interested in.
6. Create a web-based newsletter repository. By putting an archive of all of your newsletter issues you can make it more appealing for your visitors to subscribe. You will also generate additional traffic from search engines.
7. Contact other newsletter publishers. Let them know that you’d be interested to announce their newsletter if they’re up to do the same for you. This way, both of you can build your lists faster.
8. Give away useful free stuff. Write an ebook or a PDF report. Hire a programmer to create downloadable or web-based software. Then give it away to your visitors provided that they join your list.
9. Request that your subscribers pass it on. Word of mouth is a powerful viral technique that works great with email marketing. If your subscribers find the content you share with them to be useful and informative, they will pass your newsletter on to their friends. This can be a good source of new subscribers.
10. Let others reprint your newsletter, as long as its content is unmodified. Many webmasters and newsletter publishers are actively looking for high quality content, and if they reprint your newsletter, you will get new subscribers, traffic and links pointing to your site.
11. Include a “Sign Up” button in the newsletter. If you are using plain text instead of HTML, provide a text link to your subscription page. You may feel that this is not required, because the subscriber is already on your list, but remember that your readers will forward your newsletters to others, or reprint it online. You want to make it easy for them to subscribe.
12. Add a squeeze page. A squeeze page is typically designed only to build your list. It features a powerful headline and a couple of most important benefits that should make your subscribers salivate to sign up to your list. Once created, use a service such as WordTracker to find hundreds targeted keywords, and advertise on them using pay per click advertising on Google, MSN and Yahoo.
13. Include testimonials in your squeeze page. This is crucial. Put 1 or 2 strong testimonials from satisfied subscribers on your squeeze page. This can be in any format, but you may find that multimedia (audio or video social proof) is more “believable”. People like to follow footsteps of other people.
14. Blog religiously. Blogging is a great way to communicate with your potential customers, and it creates a nice synergy with your email marketing. Be sure to include your newsletter sign up form on each page of your blog.
15. Use co-registration service to build your list. Co-registration is a great way to build your email list. Your newsletter’s ad appears on other website’s and their visitors are able to check your subscription box and become added to your list. A good co-registration service can be found at GetSubscribers.com.

Simon Grabowski is an owner of the web-based GetResponse email marketing software that makes it easy for thousands of marketers and small businesses to send their newsletters and build their email lists. Try GetResponse free of charge at http://www.getresponse.com