Database segmentation for better e-mail marketing
On 10th October, 2007, Bill McCloskey, one of the writers from MediaPost.com, wrote an interesting article with the title “The Karma of E-mail”. MediaPost Communications is an integrated publishing and content company whose mission is to provide an array of resources to super-serve media planners and buyers. Their HQ is in New York if I’m not mistaken. Visit their site for more info.
Anyway, back to the topic, in his article, I would like to highlight the following…
This is one of the problems facing email. As we progressively move to less and less personal forms of communications — from handwritten letter, to targeted direct mail appeal, to email blast –we gain reach and increased ROI, but face the danger of disengaging from our customers.
As we head into this holiday season, it might be good to look back at last year’s data pulled from Return Path’s Holiday Consumer Survey last January. The key finding is that consumers want to be treated as people, not a data point in a database. They rewarded those marketers with a track record of providing valuable and useful emails in the past, and ignored those that didn’t, even when they recognized the brand and the email sender.
In fact, the only key influencer in driving open rates that gained any traction over the previous year’s survey (51.2% vs 47.7% the year before) was past experience receiving relevant, useful emails. To put it more poetically, an email program’s karma is what determines its success.
Other influencers such as Subject Line, Discounts, and Free Shipping were down significantly from the year before. Even the single most important influencer — knowing and trusting the sender — dropped nearly 5% over the previous year (55.9% vs 60.6%).
From reading his article, I recall attending a short but highly valuable course before about where they talked about database segmentation. Basically, anyone who offers newsletter subscription or any forms of e-mail subscriptions should separate their long lists of subscribers into various segments depending on their interests.
By doing it this way, your subscribers will only get e-mails containing information that they find useful or interesting. The problem is, most people start by not taking these things into considerations and they treat every subscriber as the same. The result? Just click send and everyone will get the same information.
Here’s the problem, depending on what type of information you’re providing, it is highly possible that you could be talking to many different types of people. For example, if your subscriber is a female who is single, imagine you sending her a monthly e-mail where the highlight of the month is an item meant for men only. Not suitable for her right? Let’s take another example, say your subscriber is a man, and you’re highlighting women’s shaving cream. Do you think it’s ok?
The point is, you can’t exactly send a separate email to each and everyone of your thousands or millions of subscribers but at least, at the very least, separate them into proper general segments when they sign up so that you can send them stuff that they really want from you. That is how you personalize your e-mails and provide a great experience for your subscribers/customers.
This is course highly depends on what type of information you’re offering in the first place. If you only have one product to promote to everyone, probably you don’t need to read this but for the other 99% out there with different products to promote, you should start looking into this.
Better segmentation brings in better personalization and better experience for your customers. And that means better ROI. Cheers!
October 16th, 2007 at 4:48 am
[...] Kuan Yew wrote an interesting post today on Database segmentation for better e-mail marketingHere’s a quick excerptThis is one of the problems facing email. As we progressively move to less and less personal forms of communications — from handwritten letter, to targeted direct mail appeal, to email blast –we gain reach and increased ROI, … [...]