Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Segmenting for Relevance

By Tara LambersonVice President, Marketing, MindComet CorporationBlog: http://blogs.mindcomet.com

A fundamental principle of targeted marketing is breaking up your audience into smaller, manageable groups that are likely to behave in a similar way. Email allows for concise segmentation ability as well as the opportunity to make the most of communicating with niche audience segments in a cost-effective manner.

Pertinent information collected for an individual should be used to the fullest in ongoing communication strategies. Aside from basic demographic data points such as name, age, location, income, and marital status, there are other opportunities to be unearthed by capturing recipient behavior with behavioral segmentation.

Segmenting your list by behavior gives you the ability to group individuals by content preference, allowing future communications to provide variable content with greater relevancy. The more relevant the content is to your audience, the higher your ability to influence the actions or outcome. One way to track this behavior is by monitoring click stream activity. Popular in web analytics, click stream activity will show the links users are clicking on for more information. These may be links to download documents, view a video, visit a website, listen to a podcast, or visit a blog or links to pages deeper within your site.

Another way to segment is by email activity. Consider segmenting by email opens, click-throughs, purchase decisions, ...