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

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

Have you ever received an email with gobbedygook through it?

This occurs when people compose their email messages in a word processing program, especially MS Word, and then paste them into their email client or autoresponder message box.

Instead of seeing those quotation marks, for instance, all your readers see are hieroglyphics.

There are a few ways you can solve this problem:

1.  Type directly into your email without using a word processor at all.  (That’s usually what I do for this blog.)
2. Use Notepad for your message.
3. If you must use a word processing program, be certain to save your message as “Text Only”. After you’ve saved it in that manner, you can copy and paste it into your email.

What’s your favorite quick tip? We’d love to feature it here!

Debbi Bressler
Email Marketing Specialist
GetResponse

A popular anti-spam organization, SpamHaus, was ordered by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to pay $11,715,000 in damages to e360insight and its CEO, David Linhardt. e360insight sued SpamHaus earlier this year over illegal blacklisting of their mailings.

Additionally, SpamHaus was barred from causing any email sent by e360insight or Linhardt to be “blocked, delayed, altered, or interrupted in anyway”. The court also ordered SpamHaus to publish a public apology for deeming the group a spammer.

SpamHaus, a British-based organization, did not accept the US jurisdiction and believes that the order is not enforceable. “As spamming is illegal in the United Kingdom, an Illinois court ordering a British organization to stop blocking incoming Illinois spam in Britain goes contrary to U.K. law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place” SpamHaus stated.

At GetResponse we use SpamHaus as one of the methods to filter inbound spam and prevent spammers from abusing legitimate email marketing and autoresponder campaigns. We regret that the US court system can be used as a weapon against a non-profit organization that strives to keep our mailboxes clean.

UPDATE

In a proposed court order dated 10/6/2007 Judge Charles Kocoras of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois calls on the organizations responsible for registering the Spamhaus.org Internet address to suspend the organization’s Internet service. Both ICANN and Tucows, the Spamhaus.org registrar, are named in the order.

A spam-savvy Illinois lawyer shares his perspective on the issue and believes that the outlook may be bleak for the anti-spam organization.

UPDATE #2

A federal judge presiding over a spam dispute rejected a marketing company’s request to suspend the domain name of an anti-spam group that ignored an $11.7 million judgment against it.

U.S. District Court Judge Charles P. Kocoras denied a proposed motion from e360 Insight, which sued the Spamhaus Project over its “black list” of spammers. Wheeling, Ill.-based e360 Insight contends it is improperly on the list because it is a direct marketer that does not send unsolicited e-mail.