Marketers of the World — Segment!

Next month I am going to the Inbox Marketing Conference in California and participating on a panel titled “Bull’s eye! Improving your Email Aim with Segmentation”.
In preparation for this, the other panelists and I had a conference
call this afternoon to discuss ideas and the best format for the panel.
As our conversation began, it became very obvious that we all plenty of
thoughts on the topic.

Here were a couple key takeaways:

• Segmentation and personalization are all about making your email
  marketing messages more relevant to the end recipient. The more
  relevant they are then the more effective they will be in driving whatever you
  want (e.g., clickthrough rates, conversions, …)

• Everyone knows segmentation improves results but very few
  marketers do it. Too many marketing teams, even the ones that rest in what you think would be sophisticated companies, still rely on batch + blast —
  send the same message to your entire audience.

Why do marketers do what everyone knows is less effective? The
reason for this is the same reason for just about everything in life.
It’s easier. Why do I eat out for lunch every day? It’s easier. So, my call to marketers of the world is to resist the low road and segment. The results are well worth it. Plus, I realize that email marketing products are not as intuitive as they need to be in this area. Be patient — we’re working on it!

There were many more interesting points on segments, like my theory
on the four dimensions of segmentation, but, since I had vague notions
of exercising tomorrow morning, I’ll have to cover that on a different
day.