"Be dramatically willing to focus on the customer at all costs,

even at the cost of obsoleting your own stuff."

Scott Cook - Founder of Intuit

Preface

Keeping just one email list for your customers and potential customers and emailing them all the exact same thing is a huge mistake. In order to maximize your return on investment and get the most out of your email marketing campaign you must segment your list.

List segmentation has been practiced for years in the marketing world, specifically in the area of direct mail campaigns.

What Is Segmentaion?

All segmentation involves is breaking your list into smaller groups of people who have similar likes, dislikes, demographic backgrounds, and other special characteristics. This may sound like fancy marketing talk and might seem like a daunting task for someone who is new to online marketing, however it is easily done and even just a small change will result in much larger successes with your campaigns.

Break Things Up

If your email list contains people who are already customers and those who aren’t yet but have the potential to be, you should split these two groups up. Most of the time - you will want to send them different information.

You may want to offer a better deal, discount, or coupon to new people in order to entice them to be a customer. However, you won’t want to insult your existing customers by sending them the same offer without letting them participate in the action.

Other segments you should consider are:

• Gender
• Age group
• Location
• Education level
• Knowledge about your product
• Interest characteristics

A chart detailing how to segment based on email metrics

Not All Customers Are the Same - Treat Them Differently! 

You might also want to consider separating your customers according to their level of activity. For instance, casinos maintain very accurate, detailed, and segmented lists of their customers. Each person who comes to the casino has their level of play tracked by a computer.

Then, this information is fed into the database of the casino's players. When the casino emails its customers, it separates its high-end, medium and low-end players into different mailings and sends each of them different offers. A high end player might be mailed an offer for $25 in free slot play one month, while a low end player only receives an offer for only $5 in free slot play for the same month.

The casinos also take part in prospect mailings to people who have never been customers as well. These people may receive the best offers of all in order to attract them to play. Some casino databases can be segmented into a dozen or more levels. Your business may not require this level of segmentation, but you need to think about how many different groups you should have and who should get each email before you send it out based on your own specific type of business and the people you are trying to reach.

The Basics of Segmentation 

To help with your efforts, you may want to purchase some type of software program which can handle your database and segment it for you. The casinos we talked about in the earlier example have elaborate.............