A challenge for all email marketers: consider the cost of silence. Unsatisfied subscribers stop responding. They stop talking about you on Twitter, they stop forwarding your messages. They also just plain old ignore you – becoming ‘ghost’ subscribers who don’t add value to your business.

Why would someone who gave you permission (an ‘opt in’) ignore you, unsubscribe or worse, complain (click the Report Spam) about your email message? Simple: what you sent is just not that interesting to them. Can’t say I blame those subscribers. Witness your own overflowing inbox. None of us – or our subscribers – have time to manage all the email we receive. Business professionals have an even lower tolerance than consumers when it comes to frequency and relevancy.

Time for a new world. Simply hitting ‘send’ is not going to break through and earn a response. The path is simple: send the right message to the right person at the right time. Certainly, the benefits are clear. Segmentation will increase relevancy and lower complaints (clicks on the Report Spam button that depress inbox delivery) and thus earn more revenue from the channel. It will also boost subscriber satisfaction.

What does a great segmentation strategy look like?

1. It could be as simple as separating prospects from customers on your house file and adjusting the message for each. These are singularly different groups with different relationships to your brand/products and different knowledge levels of your product and solution benefits. They have different goals with your content, products and other services, and you have different strategies to help move them through the sales cycle. Treat them differently, or you will continue to optimise your email marketing for none.
   
2. It could mean swapping out 10%-20% of your generic promotional messages (usually 2-5 messages a month for a business-to-consumer mailer) with messages that are truly custom to the subscriber. Segment your audience to address the many ‘moments of truth’ that exist in your business lifecycle. The most important for your business could include: purchase, contract anniversary, upgrade, abandoned shopping cart, browsing the site, a download, a call to customer service, or a visit to your Preference Center. You can send dedicated emails for each of these moments, or just add custom content to your existing promotions. Email technology that is readily accessible from your email service provider today makes it easy to be responsive and personal, automatically.
   
3. It could mean sorting your data and addressing the people outside your ‘best buyers’.  Certainly celebrate buyers and loyal customers, but don’t rely on this small base to drive all the new revenue you need. Look one or two tiers down. There may be a larger segment of customers or prospects who would respond more if the email programme was more custom to them. For example, a B2B publisher pulled the segment of ‘second most active readers’ and offered them a weekly digest alternative to the daily newsletters. Since this is a pretty big slice of the total file, even with a 3% opt in response there was an instantly sizeable subscriber file for the new digest. The response rates were 30x over this same segment on the daily messages – generating page views (and ad impressions) that more than made up for the lower frequency. A big win by focusing on a tier2 segment. And, might I note, a much better subscriber experience. 

‘Whoa!’ you may be thinking. ‘This channel was supposed to be free, and now you are talking about data management, additional creative and profiling subscribers!’ Well, yes. Segmentation done well requires time, resources and expertise. There is an investment – but there is also an upside. You will earn higher revenue, lower complaints, more predictable inbox deliverability, higher loyalty and greater lifetime value!

Segmentation is also important because your sender reputation and inbox deliverability depend on it. Want a response? You first have to consistently reach the inbox. Sender reputation is all about how your messages are valued. And that is primarily measured today by how many ‘complaints’ (clicks on the report spam button) are tracked by the ISPs like Hotmail, Gmail and Orange. Check your own sender reputation (each of these is based on the data that ISPs like Hotmail and Gmail and corporate system admins use to block your messages) at free sites like www.senderscore.org, www.dnsstuff.com or www.senderbase.com.

Stephanie Miller
Return Path