- Home
- » Learning Center
- » Constant Contact Blog
Better Metrics – Segmenting Your List; Part 2 of 3
Posted on Thu, 05/14/2009 - 13:42 by Caroline Shahar
Increasing the impact of your emails today is all about segmenting your list so you can send tailored communications that hit subscribers’ interests. Consider these facts:
Achieving relevancy in your emails takes more than knowing your subscribers’ email addresses, names, and what type of emails (i.e. newsletter, promotions, etc.) they want from you. In the first part of this series I discussed the first step to achieving better results – how you can quickly and easily learn what each of your subscribers actually care about. Today I’ll dive into the second step to getting more from your email marketing.
Step 2: Create lists of people with similar interests
Right from the results of your online survey (with Constant Contact’s survey tool) you can click on the number of subscribers that answered a question a particular way and “Save Respondents to a List.” Create as many lists as you want and call the lists whatever makes sense for your business. It’s that easy. You’re now set up to do more targeted marketing.
Instead of having one or two lists of people who receive every email you send, now you can send your emails to the people who would actually care and who would find your content interesting. That’s when you’ll see your open, click, and forward rates skyrocket.
A common concern I hear is that by creating multiple lists there will be more for you to manage. Don’t be concerned: Constant Contact takes care of duplicates for you. So, for example, if you have one person sitting in five lists and you want to send an email to all five lists, that one person will only get one copy of your email.
Here are some examples of how businesses commonly segment:
Now that you have your list segmented, you’re ready for the final step of maximizing your email marketing results – creating targeted emails. Next time I’ll discuss how you can provide relevancy and boost your metrics with this kind of messaging.
58% of consumers say they unsubscribe or simply stop reading emails because “emails weren’t relevant to me.”
– MarketingSherpa, Consumer Media Survey, September 2008
56% of consumers consider marketing messages from known senders to be spam if the message is “just not interesting to me.”
– Spam Complainers Survey, Q Interactive 2007
Achieving relevancy in your emails takes more than knowing your subscribers’ email addresses, names, and what type of emails (i.e. newsletter, promotions, etc.) they want from you. In the first part of this series I discussed the first step to achieving better results – how you can quickly and easily learn what each of your subscribers actually care about. Today I’ll dive into the second step to getting more from your email marketing.
Step 2: Create lists of people with similar interests
Right from the results of your online survey (with Constant Contact’s survey tool) you can click on the number of subscribers that answered a question a particular way and “Save Respondents to a List.” Create as many lists as you want and call the lists whatever makes sense for your business. It’s that easy. You’re now set up to do more targeted marketing.
Instead of having one or two lists of people who receive every email you send, now you can send your emails to the people who would actually care and who would find your content interesting. That’s when you’ll see your open, click, and forward rates skyrocket.
A common concern I hear is that by creating multiple lists there will be more for you to manage. Don’t be concerned: Constant Contact takes care of duplicates for you. So, for example, if you have one person sitting in five lists and you want to send an email to all five lists, that one person will only get one copy of your email.
Here are some examples of how businesses commonly segment:
- A book seller often segments based on the genre or authors that customers are interested in. They aren’t going to send an email promoting a thriller to a person who typically reads romances.
- A travel agency segments based on the destinations that customers are interested in and whether they travel more often for business or pleasure.
- A retailer can identify a group that only buys in store versus online and target in store specials to this group.
Now that you have your list segmented, you’re ready for the final step of maximizing your email marketing results – creating targeted emails. Next time I’ll discuss how you can provide relevancy and boost your metrics with this kind of messaging.
