What is email ‘segmenting’?

What is email ‘segmenting’ and why do marketers keep talking about it?

Usually when you think of email marketing you think of doing a ‘blast’ to your entire list, everyone gets the same message. This is how its been done for years.

But if you think about it, your list could be split up into various groups. For example:

1) You could have your list split into a male group and a female group, and have a tailor-made message for each
2) Your list could be grouped by paid customers or non-paid (leads)
3) Your list could be grouped by type of product/service they received from your company. This tells you what their interest is

Why bother?

The more tailored you can make your message to your customers, the more likely they will:

• Open your email
• Read your email
• Respond to your email

So, any information you have (location, interest, gender, etc) can be used to adjust your message.
How do I get started?

Let’s get this point out of the way: you cannot really do segmenting if you are doing all your email marketing with Outlook or Gmail, or Microsoft Live Mail.

Segmenting is something you can do it you use a web-based email marketing platform like: Mailchimp, Awebber, Sendgrid, Mailjet, etc.
Mailchimp makes this very easy allowing you to have one central database of subscribers, and lets you put ‘tags’ on each subscriber. tags could be: ‘male’, ‘lead’, etc.

Just think of the intelligent marketing you could be doing if you could refine your emails to this degree.