Many marketers still treat email marketing like a numbers game — blasting thousands of emails to a tout-le-monde type list. This approach is not only a waste of time and money. It can alienate valuable subscribers, who quickly tire of irrelevant content and offers. At best, they’ll start to ignore your emails. At worst, you’ll lose valuable subscribers who are never coming back. You should take advantage of segmenting and list management tools in your email marketing software in order to improve your conversion rates.
Why segmenting is the key to superior conversion rates.
The real goal of a successful program is to generate the greatest percentage of conversions — i.e. email opens, content downloads, info request completions, registrations, etc. — using the fewest number of email sends. Here are a series of steps you can take to achieve that end:
Segment your content into buckets of interest.
No matter what industry you’re in, different facets of your offering are going to appeal more to certain prospects. Think about how you can segment your content into buckets of interest, which can then be matched to specific prospect profiles, job descriptions, etc.
Segment your database to match the content buckets.
Take a deep-dive into your analytics data. Find out what content topics and types are being accessed most often, and by which profile groups. As much as possible, limit the emails that sent to these groups to the most relevant topics for them. With the right automation software, you can even apply this level of message customization at the individual-subscriber level.
Create a snowball effect with relevant content.
When a prospect or subscriber clicks on a certain article, you have a good idea of his/her general interests. Find ways to present additional relevant content while that person is still in the click-through mindset. One way is use a column of a landing page to present an abstract for a related article, giving you an added hit out of the same email.
Avoid supplying too much of a good thing.
Even your most interested and engaged subscribers don’t want to be continually bombarded with email blasts. Allow enough time between emails to give them some mental “white space.” They’re more apt to read and/or download the content you send them — and to look forward to your next email send.