Email Marketing Tips: Segmenting Your Email List for Better Response Rates
20. Oct, 2011 
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Sometimes as marketers we might fall into the trap of seeing our email opt-in list as a crowd of people who have all raised their hands and expressed enough interest in our products and services to subscribe to our email list. But you might take a step back and consider that your email list subscribers are actually individuals that should be related to one at a time.
Each subscriber is a person with their own unique motivations, needs, wants, desires and preferences. Each is also in a different place in the buying cycle. That is why segmenting your email list is important because people who find themselves at different places in the buying cycle will respond to different marketing messages. I am subscribed to an email list whose owner does not carefully segment the list. I received an email with an offer that I responded to, yet I keep getting emails reminding me of the deadline for responding to that offer. It irritates me to see those messages because I’ve already done what they are asking me to do. It’s beginning to feel like nagging now and messages like these inspire subscribers to unsubscribe.
When you segment your lists, situations like this do not occur because once I responded to the offer, I would have been added to a new list so that the list owner would then know exactly what I wanted and could craft messages that would appeal to the needs that I have expressed by the actions that I have already taken.
Here are some ideas for how you might begin to approach segmenting your email subscriber list:
New Subscribers
Keeping your new subscribers in a group where you can court them so to speak and find out exactly what they need and want from you can help you serve them better and help keep them around longer.
Survey Responders
Using surveys is a great way to get accurate data about your subscriber’s preferences. Use their responses to segment them so that you can tailor your marketing messages accordingly.
Buying habits
You can segment your list by the types of products people buy, when they buy or the general price range of the products they tend to purchase.
Inactive subscribers
Subscribers who have not opened your emails for months can be grouped as, “inactive,” and you can send them a message asking them if they would like to continue to remain on your list or unsubscribe.
Demographics
It can be valuable to know the gender, age, zip code, and occupation of your subscribers so that if you have an offer that would be of interest to women who live in the north eastern U.S. you are not sending these offers to men who live in the south.
Even as you are grouping together your subscribers so that you can better communicate with them, keep in mind that you will be communicating to them one at a time. People love individualized attention and your subscribers will love it if it seems like you really ‘get’ them, have a feel for what they want, and do your best to deliver it to them. In return you’ll get amazingly high response rates because they will appreciate being made to feel like a valued customer rather than just a number on a list.
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