Topica's Blog

Howdy, blog readers- and welcome to Wednesday!

This week’s email marketing tip is focusing on the ever-so-important technique of targeting your subscribers. We’ll look at how to do so successfully in 4 steps, which include deciding how to segment your list, whether to use behavioral or self segment techniques, implementing a plan, and finally analyzing your results. Let’s get started…

Decide how to segment your list
Before jumping into segmenting your subscriber base, you will want to understand how you want to split them up. Your customers can probably fall into a lot of different groups and then into many more subgroups. This can go on forever as you get more granular. While this might be a good idea further down the line, you will want to keep your groups simple at first. Come up with 2 to 5 categories of interest; this can be as simple as breaking it up into men and women, or product interest, etc. depending on your list. Make sure that the categories are very clear cut so that individuals can easily identify one from the other, i.e. if you have a clothing site and you have a) outdoor gear and b) camping, you might just want to combine the groups to avoid overlapping campaigns.

Behavioral vs Self segmentation
Behavioral segmentation takes a customer’s interactions with a web page or an email and uses this information to serve up offers or content that are relevant to the customers previous interactions. A good example of this is Ticketmaster’s ticket alert. If you’ve ever bought tickets from Ticketmaster, you may have received email alerts of shows in your area. For example, last year I bought tickets to see comedian Charlie Murphy here in San Francisco. Months later, I was getting emails from Ticketmaster alerting me that Dave Chappelle was coming to SF. In this instance, Ticketmaster knew that I had an interest in comedy and sent me information about a performance I would be interested in seeing. Now, I’m not saying that it’s foolproof (there are times I get alerts on people I would have no interest in seeing at all) but the fact that I have a personal alert system in place helps bring me back to use Ticketmaster again.

The more traditional way of segmenting your audience is by letting them select the type of information they would like to receive. This is the version of segmentation we are all familiar with where a customer may come to your site and opt-in to receive more information, usually by indicating a product interest when signing up for newsletters. By allowing customers to self segment, you let customers know that they will get a certain type of information, and can communicate a schedule on which they will be sent this information. 

Build a program that can be mirrored for each segment
It’s important to keep your programs simple at first. Come up with one plan that can be implemented for each segment. Here are just a few that you can consider: recommendations based on product purchase, discount offers to customers with high purchase orders, and special incentives for new registrations. Work with one of these and implement several campaigns. You may want to set your plans up as auto-responders to make your job easier.

Analyze the Results
View your reports. Did the program you ran yield the results you wanted? If not, you may want to try another program. Remember, depending on how you segment your list, one set of campaigns may perform better with one group than with another. It will take a bit of trial and error, but eventually you will have the perfect program for each of your audience segments.

Happy Emailing,

Topica Seal

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Filed under: Audiences, Email Marketing Tips, Personalization, Using Forms