7 simple and effective ways to use email segmentation
A database filled with a lot of quality data offers many possibilities. The best way to send an email is to send one that's personal and completely adjusted to fit the needs, interests, and (buying) behaviour. And more relevant email campaigns means a better shot at more opens and clicks.
In this blog post, I'll show you different options to segment your customer database, enabling you to better target each customer.
7 ways to segment your email lists
1. By gender
One of the more obvious ways to segment your email campaigns: do you want to target men or women? When creating your email templates, try to design a template which is able to switch content based on the variable 'gender'.
Adjust the images in your campaigns to appeal to men as soon as you are targeting the men in your marketing database. The same…
How intelligent segmentation helped Homebase drive instore bookings and increased revenue
eCircle worked with their client Homebase to support them in increasing their Ecommerce revenue through planning and executing a highly targeted personalised triggered email campaign, to sell their high value kitchens.
This blog post takes you through the campaign goals, planning and execution and to show the approach Homebase used.
Recommended Guide:
Just updated for 2013, our 80 page email guide will help you review all aspects of email marketing from communications strategy to creative and copy.
Download our 7 Steps to Email marketing guide.
Email Campaign Goals
The business goal of Homebase was primarily to increase their sales revenue of their high value products (kitchens) by drawing in customers instore to meet their Kitchen Designers,…
Ideas for improving Basket Abandonment Emails that are relevant to other types of email follow-up
On a recent webinar, a question was posed that I thought was worth a second look:
'On an abandonment programme, sending a discount to encourage a purchase may not necessarily be a good idea, so what would be a good hook to get their interest peeked again?'.
This touches on another subject; the inevitable decline in response rates for basket abandonment emails. Some argue against this, but it is inevitable. I consider basket abandonment emails as just another product and therefore they will inevitably follow the same path as any other product, as illustrated in the classic graph below.
So, what can you do to ensure that your results do not decline?
5 Tips to improve email response rates for basket abandonment
Tip 1 The Basics
Please excuse me…
From business case to budgets: How to choose the best email marketing tool
Email marketing automation has had such a significant impact in sectors such as financial services, hospitality and retail, that when Forrester outlined the mega-trends that were shaping the market, the growth of automation tools was one of the top contributors.
'If you want to launch a sophisticated acquisition and retention email marketing campaign, you have to have good trigger-based programmes to keep engaging the users - and that has given rise to the entire field of email marketing automation,' says Forrester analyst JitenderMiglani.
But with well over 100 different email marketing vendors in the UK alone, finding a vendor isn’t the challenge – it’s choosing the right one.
Where to begin with choosing an email marketing vendor?
'Before you even start your search for the perfect vendor, it’s essential to assess where your current…
Tips to create an effective email template... from header to footer
Here's a useful infographic for Email marketers from Email template designers Email Monks. My favourite infographics prompt us to think "how can we do this better"?
While this covers the obvious such as Subject lines and blocked images, I like the way it covers some of the less well known details that we cover in our Email guides and course such as pre-headers, Johnson boxes and an ideal email template width of 500 to 650 pixels.
If you found this useful, you may also want to check out our hub page on email creative and copywriting for more advice. …
The value of setting, meeting and changing subscriber expectations
If at first you don't succeed, lower your expectations... It's the secret to a happy life.
And one of the (seemingly hundreds) of secrets to email marketing success is guiding and accounting for subscriber expectations.
A problem here is that marketers and customers are not always on the same page.
A recent survey by RegReady, for example, found that 80% of consumers felt very strongly that making a purchase does not constitute permission to market to them via email. Yet 47% of marketers were sending emails to purchasers without this permission.
Marketers and consumers are "digitally different". Research by ExactTarget discovered, for example, that 61% of marketers follow at least one brand on Twitter, but only 12% of consumers do so.
We live in a different world and our understanding of consumers is…
What Email Marketers need to learn from Retailers
How email marketers can use behavioural email to increase customer loyalty and drive more purchases
I believe email marketers have major lessons to learn from how the world’s leading offline retailers market to customers before, during and after their purchases. These companies serve as great examples of why email marketers need to go beyond the basic newsletter.
One of the best ways to frame email marketing is to focus on one key event; the purchase and then break it into three phases:
3 Phases of behavioural email marketing related to purchase
1. Before: The customer isn’t necessarily ready to make the purchase, but your goal is to stay top of mind and nurture the relationship until they are.
2. During: The customer is in the process of making a purchase, and your goal is to ensure they have…
No pain. No gain... Take time out to create an effective contact management plan
From working in different sizes of organisations, it is clear that ‘Contact Management Strategy’ is still an unmet aspiration, often accompanied by other buzzwords like ‘Channel Strategy”, “Multi-Channel Strategy” and “Customer Journey Mapping”.
Why solid contact management plans are needed
From what I see, it’s questionable if the planning or implementation of contact management is as effective it could or should be across many organisations. It seems that while the need is recognised, time is not set aside to create a contact management plan, integrated across customer touchpoints. In this post, I'll reference what is needed, that is, to create a framework and planning tool to plan and roll-out the communication strategy, aligned to the business goals which may include conversion, gaining more customer…
What has email got to do with website conversion?
“WTF?” – That’s most people’s first reaction when I try and explain how important email can be for site conversion. But if you think about it logically; email is a great touchpoint for communicating with your existing customers and registrants (those that traditionally have higher conversion rates), so it makes sense that if you can maximise the impact of these visitors you can positively influence online conversion.
Ultimately, deployed at the right touchpoints, email enables you to continue user journeys even when the user is not on your site. Below is a simple flow chart showing how email can aid specific user journeys to increase conversion.
Whenever people talk about the elements of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) they mention MVT (or testing in general), analytics, usability, user experience (UX), databases, recommendation engines, personalisation etc…
What these…
Buyometrics’ success formula for 7% click rates on daily emails
Email campaigns with unique open rates of 30% and unique click rates of 7% beat email marketing benchmarks and represent great performance that any campaign manager would be happy with. Now try doing that for a daily email across your entire customer database...
That’s harder, but it’s a reality for the Buyometric Daily Deal campaigns. Buyometric are letting me lift the lid on their success formula.
The corner-stone is using highly dynamic and automated deal content targeting driven from a predictive algorithm which factors in several signals about what will most likely appeal to subscribers.
It starts with collecting user preference information after signup. Providing preference information is optional after the signup, yet Buyometric get a massive 78% of new signups to complete this optional step. Its all down to the incredibly smooth user experience, I’ve previously posted about how this works…
