Targeting and Segmentation

MarketingSherpa has a great case study of a retailer that got a 208% higher conversion (purchase) rate for a targeted email sent to a small segment (10%) of their list.

“These types of campaigns appeal to a specific group, and it’s important that we maintain the integrity of our list. Marketing the wrong message to our group is going to increase our unsubscribe rate and [hurt] the response to our emails,” Kimura says.

This story tells us that Artbeads.com is looking at the long term. They’ve discovered that cultivating their email subscribers and catering to their needs is as important as frequency or any other metric for sending email.

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Data Cleansing part 2

In an effort to get a blog post out yesterday before yet another doctor’s appointment I did not do nearly enough research on the company I mentioned selling list cleansing data. As Al correctly pointed out in the comments they are currently listed on the SBL. And when I actually did the research I should have done it was clear this company has a long term history of sending unsolicited email.
Poor research and a quickly written blog post led to me endorsing a company that I absolutely shouldn’t have. And I do apologize for that.
With all that being said, Justin had a great question in the comments of yesterday’s post about data cleansing.

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Now you know…

The key to email marketing, at least if you read blogs and talk to experts who blog about such things, is to segment your lists. But what does segmenting your lists really mean? Ken touches on it in a recent article about engagement and segmenting.
Segmenting your list means, quite simply, knowing your audience. It means tailoring your message to them, in order to extract as much money from them as possible. It means knowing which subscribers you can push with volume and which you will lose if you increase things too far.
In short, it means not treating all your subscribers the same, instead treating them slightly differently based on how they interact with your message.
To some people, this is too difficult. Ken even quoted someone in the industry as saying

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Best time to send email: analysis and discussion

Mark Brownlow (who I don’t think is here in Ams, much to my disappointment) wrote a long assessment of how to determine what is the best time to send email. He walks through the questions and the data that a sender should evaluate when making the decision when to best send email.
I have previously posted about my views on the best time to send email. There is no one best time to send email. In fact, my experience leads me to believe if someone said the best time to send email is at 4pm on Tuesday afternoon then 4pm on Tuesday afternoon would rapidly become the absolute worst time to send email.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I really like Mark’s #4 recommendation.

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