Audience Segmentation Boosts Your Email Marketing Solution

By:Robert Burko

Using email marketing solutions can immensely improve your marketing efforts and assist you achieve your goals. However, once you've decided to make an email marketing solution a part of your marketing mix, what can you do to help boost your results and ensure you get the greatest return on investment (ROI) possible?

One of the most important and fundamental parts of your email marketing campaign is your mailing list. But, the key to really boost your results is to actually fragment your lists, so you can better target people based on their unique interests. It goes without saying that no two people are exactly the same, so why would you treat everyone on your mailing list the same? By segmenting your list you can make better offers that produce a higher response rate and garner greater overall results from your email marketing software.

When you begin to divide your list, the first thing you need to decide is what factors or criteria will determine the various contact groups you will create. Some companies decide to segment purely based on demographics. This can include attributes like gender, age, etc. While demographics is usually the aspect that most people think about when they discuss segmentation, there are many more factors you can use to divide your contact list. As with many things, the most obvious approach (ie. Gender-based segmentation) is not necessarily the one that will produce the greatest benefit.

Often times you can get the greatest results with your email marketing solution when you divide based on past purchasing behavior. For example, if you sell 5 different products, you can segment your list based on what each customer actually purchased. So, you would have a mailing list segment for people who purchased Product "A", another one for people who purchased Product "B", and so on. This often proves to be highly effective, because you can launch special promotions that target these customers and the specific products or services that you know they are interested in.

Many companies will use their email marketing software to reach out to one of these product-interest segments when a new version or model or their product or service comes out. Often you see, an email marketing campaign that says, "A new version of Product "A" has just been released and we'll offer you 15% off if you upgrade", this produces a fantastic response rate. It's important the actual word usage and offer be tailored to your business, but the concept still holds true regardless of what you are trying to promote.

A business can also divide its list based on general customer interests. For instance, a sporting goods store may segment based on the type of sports/activity the consumer is interested in. So, their specific segments would have titles such as: Baseball, Football, Basketball, Hockey, etc. A movie theater or movie rental store may segment based on genre. In that case their segments would have titles such as: Drama, Action, Comedy, Horror, etc. By knowing what the clientele is interested in, you can better launch meaningful campaigns with your email marketing solution. After all, if you send an email to someone who has no interest in and has never played golf, but you offer them a discount on golf clubs, it is most likely a wasted effort.

When it comes time to segment your mailing list to boost your email marketing solution results, it is important that you take a good look at your business and figure out what type of classification scheme will give you the best results. By giving this issue some thought at the very beginning, you will be able to reap the rewards of having a well formulated mailing list right out off the bat.

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Article keywords: Email marketing software, mailing list, email marketing, segmentation, marketing, promotion

Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com

Robert Burko is President of EliteEmail.com, the complete email marketing solution trusted by businesses of all types. Elite Email is proudly part of the EliteAnswers.com business solution family.

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