Segmenting your email list sounds like a complicated task but it doesn’t have to be. It’s just the process of separating your lists into smaller targeted groups, giving you the ability to choose what you promote to any given group. Let’s discuss a few of the things you need to think about when segmenting your lists.
The first thing you’ll have to figure out is exactly how you’re going to segment your lists. The simplest method is to set up a new list for each new product or website you’re promoting, or at least a new list for each new topic. eg. If you’re building a list in the internet marketing niche you might have lists that are targeted at traffic generation, content creation and social networking.
This works well because when you want to send a promotion for something, you can target the list that would be most likely to be interested. Using our example, if you were going to promote some sort of traffic generation tool, you might want to promote it only to your traffic list.
The biggest drawback to creating new lists for each new segment is having to track it all. The more lists you have, the harder it gets. This is particularly true if you’re creating a new list for every new product or site, but even if you segment by topic it can get out of control eventually.
It can also make it harder to email your entire list, since you have to send the email to every one of the lists that you’ve created. And if people are subscribed to more than one of your lists, you’ll need to ensure that you don’t send the same message to them more than once.
An alternative is to use an email service that lets you segment one large list by tagging your subscribers. You could tag some subscribers with “traffic” and others with “content” as appropriate, but ultimately they’re on all the same large list. The advantage of this is that you can easily email your entire list at once, or choose more targeted segments.
Many email providers that offer this kind of list segmentation also make it easier to transfer people from one segment to another or add them to a new one.
This is an advantage when you have both buyers and prospects on your list. When a prospect buys something from you, they can be moved to the buyers segment without having to subscribe them to a new list and unsubscribe them from the old one.
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