Email Segmentation: How to Talk to Your Reader
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
Tags
email marketing, email, autoresponder, autoresponders
February 20th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
[…] Email Segmentation: How to Talk to Your Reader, we defined email segmentation and discussed why you might want to incorporate it in your email […]