If you're one of the 4.1 billion people who use email, hearing this isn't news to you. In fact, it's not even a surprise to those who use email. marketers sending email messages. Only 4% of companies could rate the performance of their email campaigns as "excellent," according to a recent study by Campaign Monitor.
Not good for marketers, and not a good experience for readers. We can and must do better. We have to build better mailing lists if we expect our digital marketing machine to perform well today, tomorrow and in the future.
So... how to be a better email marketer?
A great email marketer is one that sends the right message to the right person at the right time. In other words, relevant messages. And this is why segmentation is fundamental to a successful email marketing strategy: it helps create a context for the messages you send.
Consider this: when consumers were asked to rate the statement "Most of the marketing messages I receive do not have content or offers that are of interest to me," 63% agreed or strongly agreed. Note that these people did not say the content was bad, just that it was not relevant.
You can write the best message in the world, but if it's not relevant to your audience, it's just a waste of time for the audience and for you. The more you focus on context, the more fruit you will reap. The more personalized your message is, the better results you will get. Just take a look at this table comparing a mass mailing versus a personalized mailing, where relevance increases considerably.
Improving segmentation strategy and moving towards personalization is an immediate and high-impact way to optimize email marketing strategy.
With this in mind, pay attention to these 3 types of lists that you should work with to maximize segmentation, personalization and individualization; in other words: the relevance.
- Life cycle lists
The term lifecycle in marketing refers to the way you communicate with your contacts, from their first point of contact to the end of their customer lifecycle. Lifecycle segmentation helps you track where a contact is in the lifecycle. This typically includes a list of marketing blog subscribers, leads (leads), qualified marketing leads, customers and evangelists.
- Commitment lists
Contact segmentation is done based on how they have interacted with various online channels and communications. Why are they important? A good segmentation strategy uses both implicit and explicit data. Explicit data is information that a contact voluntarily shares with a company. For example, the information they provide on a web page or in a contact form.
Implicit data is information obtained from user behavior. Engagement lists leverage implicit data to send more relevant messages.
According to a Mailchimp study, segmented and personalized emails have 14,31% more opens and 100,95% more clicks than non-segmented emails.
- Behavioral lists
These are actions automatically targeted to your contacts based on their interactions across multiple channels: social media, email marketing, website and others. They track specific behaviors of your contacts, such as forms they have filled out, pages they have visited, etc. According to a study by MarketingSherpa, 39% of the marketers said that "sending email messages automatically based on behavior" is the most effective tactic for improving email effectiveness.
However, a survey in which Econsultancy asked marketers "Which of the following practices are a part of your email marketing efforts?" yielded that only 20% of the email marketers uses behavioral segmentation.
Behavioral targeting is about taking a user-centric approach. In other words, it's the action your potential customers take to receive what they want to receive. It is, in essence, the dream of every email marketersegment: the segment of one.
In short, to be a better email marketer involves focusing on relevance through segmentation, personalization and contact behavior. Adopt these practices and you will see a significant improvement in your email marketing campaigns.
