How to raise your open rate and your profit

The most effective way that you can engage with your audience through email is to send personalized messages that are timely.  Personalized email produces higher email open rates.  Higher email open rates result in higher engagement with your business.  Higher engagement yields higher sales.  Continuing to stay in touch with relevant personalized email after the sale, leads to higher customer retention and loyalty.  Email, when it is used in the right way, can provide your business with huge rewards.  Let’s look at 4 different ways you can segment your email list for increased open rates, audience engagement, profits, customer loyalty.

Segment your list

Segmenting your audience is the key to targeted mailings that are highly relevant to the recipient.

Segmenting your list is fundamentally about providing personalized messages to your audience.  Personalizing is about more than using a person’s name.  It is about providing that person with a message that is highly relevant.  Through the wonders of modern technology, this is done by list segmentation.  List segmentation is simply a way of sending a specific message to only part of your list.  That part of your list is called a list segment.  Email list segmentation is really about the ability to send highly targeted relevant messages to your audience.  Here are four different ways to segment your list to provide your audience with the kind of personalized messages that will increase your open rates and ultimately your profits as well.

Segment your list by interest

Segmenting by interest is about recognizing that the people on your list are there for different reasons and have different interests.  Perhaps some were added because of a purchase, while others were added because they expressed interest in working with you, or perhaps asked for more information about a specific product or service that you provide.  The common denominator here is that you have permission from everyone to send them email, but their reasons for giving you permission and indeed their interest, represent a great way to divide up your list for the purpose of sending email.  An example of this in action would be a tire store sending an email only to truck owners, announcing a sale on truck tires.  How can you segment your list by interest?

Segment your list by time

Segmenting by time can be done in several different ways.  One way is to segment your list so that your primary mailings are going only to those who have opened your email within the last 6 months or so.  Another way is to segment your list so that certain mailings are sent to people based on how long ago they made their last purchase.

Segment your list by location

Although most professional grade email marketing and list management programs (I recommend AWeber for most small businesses) provide a way to segment your list by geographic location based on the geo-location address for the person’s IP, this is not what you want to use for segmenting your list.  The reason is that the geo-location of the subscriber’s IP address is frequently the corporate address of that person’s ISP.  Segmenting your list by location is a great idea that allows you to target subscribers in certain geographic areas with mailings for a live event in their areas.  The most reliable way to segment your list by geographic region is to collect the physical mailing address (or at least the city/state) when a subscriber is added to your list.

Segment your list by membership

Segmenting your list by membership is a way of sending targeted mailings to subscribers based on their membership to either a formal membership program that you have or even to members of a group that you define for marketing purposes.  For example, a special mailing aimed at your most valuable clients rewarding them with advance notice of and access to a special sale.

List segmentation is the key to providing your audience with messages that are highly personalized to their specific needs and interests.  Highly targeted mailings are way more effective than the generic mass mailings that get sent straight to the trash folder.  Provide your audience with regular mailings that are highly relevant because they have been personalized with them in mind, and you will see your open rates as well as your profits increase.  Relevancy is the key to capturing and keeping your audience’s attention over time.

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