Segmenting your lists

Posted by writer | Its all about the buzzz.. »

When you are communicating to your lists, its important to send messages that are directly relevant to them. The more they feel that the email is “custom designed” for them, the more likely they will be to buy from you. Since this effects your conversion rates and hence your bottom-lines, it becomes important to divide your list into sub groups or chunks.

List segmenting is a crucial part of email marketing. You should try to tweak your messages to speak to specific chunks of your list directly in terms of what your products offer to those individuals.

This is not as difficult as it sounds, all you have to do is to think about the basic categories that you can divide your list into and use your auto-responder system to build those groups into sublists. You can segment them based on your businesses, your campaigns, your relationship levels with them, your specific niches, etc.

This will enable you to send targeted and focused messages to those groups who will benefit from the email message the best. You will also be able to target your current and potential customers accordingly.

You could start with a lead generation opt-in form on your website that offers a give away, something of value in relation to the event your promoting in return for a new visitors name and email address.

By giving it up the people on this list would receive a series of emails written with the sole purpose of leading them into wanting to know more about the event. Our testing has shown that you get the best conversions by sending an e-mail every day for the first 10 days or so. At ten days we find its best to offer subscribers another document or discount (something of value) that indicates a willingness to attend the event.

Its called list segmenting where those people who sign up to receive the second giveaway become hot leads for that event leaving those who don’t on your initial leads list. It’s best to pull the foot off the gas for the people remaining on this list. Cut the frequency of emails that you send them back to one per week for another four weeks at which point offer them the second giveaway again to see if they opt-in.

For those who don’t scale all communication back to a monthly email so that you stay in touch without annoying them for the next 12 months.

For your hot leads list you should elevate them into a secondary email campaign where they receive updates about the event every few days leading into it. The objective of this campaign is to have these people buy tickets online early. The more people with tickets in hand early the more people will want to attend in the run down to the the close date for ticket sales.

You want your plan to include all the attributes of a good launch with a scarcity play built in to effect the maximum conversion rate.

Those people who do buy tickets should be elevated to your customer list which is the next most important list in your life, outside of friends and family and it should be treated accordingly.

Segment your lists early in the planning stages instead of waiting to do it later. I would advice you to look for good auto-responder or ‘mailing list management’ softwares for your business.