Should I be using segmentation?

Segmentation (email and mobile marketing segmentation) is the practice of organizing and tweaking both the delivery and message of your communications based upon your various audiences' likeliness to respond favorably to it. Accordingly, the opposite of segmentation is blasting all of your leads, clients, major clients, friends, family, and any stray animals that may have stumbled into your sign-up forms with the fire hose of potentially irrelevant calls to action. Studies have shown that segmented campaigns yield better open and click rates and, generally, a correctly segmented campaign will feed your subscribers info they want to receive and are therefore more likely to act upon (favorably). So, yes, if you can segment you definitely should!

But how do I get information about my subscribers?

Luckily, you can get a good bit of it from your ESP. No, not your psychic powers; save those for later. Your Email Service Provider can usually provide open, click, bounce, spam reporting, and unsubscribe rates. (And Congruent Media can help you automate the flow of that data into your segmentation scheme.) Beyond that, you can (and should) be prompting your new subscribers to declare a bit about themselves (standard name, zip code, and optional demographics) as well as their contact preferences (which types of content they want to receive) when they load their email addresses into your sign-up forms (guess what, Congruent can set that up for you). And, finally, some of the most useful criteria can be gleaned from your own internal records (visitation and purchasing trends, leads analysis, etc -- yep, we can help you map that too).

OK, provided I have information, what kinds of segments can I make?

The possibilities are limitless but here are some of the tried and true:

Basic rules

• Control yourself -- Reserve the mass email blast to absolutely high priority, need-to-know, Earth-shattering news.
• Verify, verify, verify -- The first email a new subscriber gets should be a verification email. Make sure your recipients are verified before sending them anything.

Segments based on typically "user-submitted" info

• Specified interests -- Probably the most important segment of all; prompt your subscribers to declare their content preferences and then feed them exactly what they want -- no more, no less.
• Location -- Your subscribers in NYC may have different interests than your subscribers in Boise, Idaho. Likewise, your subscribers in Dallas may have different interests than your subscribers in Canada.
• Other identity info -- The domain of your subscribers email address, whether or not they have a cell phone or fax number, or if they cared to tell you how much they earn a year -- all good material.
• Origins -- Subscribers who found you via Google may have different interests than those who found you in a magazine.

Segments based on typically "analyzed" info

• Leads turned clients -- Certainly, these are two different animals and you want to treat them accordingly. Leads should receive incentives to become clients and clients should receive incentives to remain clients.
• VIP clients -- Make special offers to special people.
• High and low openers -- You may want to find another way to contact people who don't tend to open their emails. Conversely, someone who likes to open emails might be a good prospect for your next campaign.
• High and low visitors -- Someone who hasn't been to your site recently may respond favorably to a light tease of your latest offerings. Or, someone who's been visiting regularly might be more likely to sign on to a new campaign.

The main purpose of segmentation isn't necessarily to avoid hassling people (although that's an added benefit of the process); rather, you should be attempting to develop content and communication patterns that fit the specific needs and desires of those people who support you. If you need help developing a segmentation framework, please contact us!