5 Quick Tips to Better eCampaign Results
Breaking up lists beats normal broadcasts by 10 times
by Matt Highsmith, CEO, TailoredMail

Welcome to the first installment of this monthly column, "eMarketing Strategies." In every issue, you can count on advice, tips and information on how to get the biggest bang from your eCampaigns and other electronic marketing.

There's a quiet shift in email marketing strategy these days that is producing big results and should be familiar to anyone who has put together direct marketing programs before -- segmentation. Segmentation is the process of breaking up your leads/lists into logical groupings, so that content and/or promotions are targeted to the right audience, and in the right context. Extensive studies within the email industry show that for lists with as low as 5,000 names, your opens and clicks can improve as much as 10-times their normal performance through simple segmentation. Here are five quick, straightforward ideas on how to test this approach:

1 - Weekend versus weekday

This is one of the easiest, and often most effective, segmentation tests. Here's how it works: we've learned that email addresses from many of the top Web-based Internet service providers (ISP) are often secondary addresses, or consumer-oriented, and they open their emails more often on the weekend. These domains include Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, Earthlink, AOL and GMail. For many clients, these addresses can make up more than half the subscriber base. When you broadcast your content to this group on the weekend and everyone else on a weekday -- compare that to your normal results -- most clients report that this almost doubled results.

2 - Interests

This is the most obvious and often requires that you capture users' interests and preferences when they sign up. From there, segmentation can be automatic and simple. Most of our clients come to the party with zero segmentation applied to their lists, so we advise segmenting users based on their click-through behavior. For example, if content or a campaign was sent out regarding a specific subject, capture those names and put them into their own "list." Keep doing this until you have a reasonable set of unique groupings.

You don't need to know every subscriber's interests -- that's not likely to happen using this approach plus they don't want to provide more information than necessary when signing up. Instead, put the leftover names into a generic group -- and you can continue pulling names out of that grouping as you go. Bachrach Men's clothing does this based on a subscribers click-through behavior for shoes, sweaters and suits, for example. After segmenting, the results tripled.

3 - Status

An easy segmentation trick is to distinguish users based on whether they are customers, prospects, partners, press or employees -- and perhaps segment them by geographical location (for example, Europe, US, Canada, Asia and Latin America). If you don't have this information, use a poll or mini-survey and ask subscribers for more detailed profile and feedback information in exchange for a free white paper, prize-drawing or something else they want.

4 - Time of day

Often overlooked is the ability to capture the subscribers' time zone when they sign-up. While some newsletter systems automatically do this, you can easily add Javascript to your sign-up page and put that information into a hidden field. After that, group your lists based on the best times to send out the email newsletter. Emails delivered after 9:00 a.m. their time significantly helps boost results.

5 - Topic-based opt-out

Add a simple, "I'm not interested in XYZ -- please remove this from my profile" at the end of a campaign or in the footer of the email. Simply track readers who click this link and remove them from one of your defined segments. As a result, subscribers like this approach AND it lowers the number of people unsubscribing to the email. How does this happen? When given a choice -- many readers want to continue receiving your content, but when they only get an option to unsubscribe -- then they will. The key is to consistently promote to your readers that you want to send them the most relevant content possible, but you need their help and feedback to make it happen.

Those are some quick ideas break up your mailing lists. Let the chopping commence and get ready to see exciting results. We'd love to hear how it worked for you, so feel free to contact us. 'Til next time, here's to fast-growing email campaigns.