In email marketing, experience has shown the importance of dividing your mailing list into segments. This step, where you tailor the content to groups of recipients, can immediately increase your return on investment. Do you know all the ways to segment your mailing list? In the simplest terms: all is possible. You can divide your contacts into as many groups as you have information on them. Following are a few examples.
Demographics
Undisputedly, the most common method to segment a mailing list is by socio-demographic group. Gender, age, language, income and place of residence are all effective ways to categorize your recipients. These simple segments form the basis of your targeting process.
Interest level
Use the detailed statistics from previous mailings to help you establish a segmentation strategy. You know who opened your messages, who clicked a particular link, who clicked the same link repeatedly, etc. Now you simply need to use this data to create a new segment according to interest level. Furthermore, you can use parameters to categorize your links and create sub-segments of subscribers who clicked a certain type of link.
Pusrchasing History
Your database can be configured to retain the purchasing histories of subscribers. Using this data, you can create groups by analyzing their activities based on recency, frequency, and monetary value (RFM). You can then send special offers or invitations only to your best customers, or to raise interest levels, only to less interested subscribers.
Web-site Activity
Another means of segmenting your mailing list is by analyzing the habits of visitors to your site. For example, send special offers on winter jackets to visitors who regularly viewed that section of your site. You can learn more about the interests of visitors from their browsing habits than from their answers on a questionnaire. With this knowledge, you can further refine your segments.
Lead Scoring
If you wish to fine-tune your mailing list even further, lead scoring can be highly effective. This method consists of using all the standard methods of analysis to assign a point score to each prospective customer. Depending on the parameters you define, each action a contact takes can add or subtract from their score. You can then target your campaign only at those contacts that scored the highest (or lowest) lead score.
