By Stepha Vesper, NPI, Inc.’s Marketing Communications Specialist

We’re back at it today, teaching you how to segment your email list for maximum impact in your email marketing campaigns!

Make sure you check out the first post in this series here.

Prune Your List Wisely
Let’s say that you’re three email sends in on a well thought-out campaign with a list that’s been run through NeverBounce. Now is a great time to take a peek at your analytics and open rates to get a sense of the picture your contacts are painting. You’re likely to encounter these types of recipients:

1. The Ones Who Open Every Email: Great, yes, keep them around!

2. The One Who Open One or Two: Encouraging for sure, but we’ll have to pay close attention to the subject lines that seem to catch their eye.

3. The Ones Who Open None: Tough crowd. We’re going to have to make some choices.

The latter two categories may make us feel like tearing our hair out, but these are actually the types of contacts that help us become savvy marketers. If every contact opened every email, there’s a chance we would never know what makes certain subject lines stand out. And worse yet, we would never fully understand what kinds of offers entice our audience, making for a swift downturn in results if they were to move on to the next big thing. Segmenting your contact list is the best way to get a handle on contacts’ different reactions to your marketing campaigns.

When we say, “segment,” we’re simply referring to the idea of using insights and information you’ve gathered from your email open rates to create different types of lists within your contacts on the Emma platform. Depending on a contact’s activity, you’ll want to place them in various lists to make managing your campaigns, trying out new ideas and gaining even more insights as easy as possible.

1. How to Segment: The Ones Who Open Every Email
The Ones Who Open Every Email are the ones you want sticking around. They seem to like you, after all! You don’t want to let them down or bore them, so it’s important to be strategic about how you keep them interested for the long-haul. With this type of email contact, you have the opportunity to really drill down and start catering to more specific audiences within The Ones Who Open Every Email umbrella.

You can start by building segments by demographics. You can use location, occupation, age, homeownership status or any number of different pieces of information to divide your list into more drilled down and specific audiences. For example, you might offer a radon test coupon for a group of real estate agents in a specific city to pass on to their clients.

2. How to Segment: The Ones Who Open One or Two
This middle-of-the-road crowd is your best source for getting to the bottom of your biggest marketing questions. They’re mostly engaged, but they’re picky, and they won’t open just any email. Chances are, they have lots of emails vying for their attention every day, and they’ll devote attention and consideration to only the best ones.

This audience will be a huge help when it comes to A/B testing. A/B testing involves resending an email to a list, but changing up the subject line. If a portion of your audience is only opening some emails from you, you’ll be able to test which types of subject lines seem to catch their eye with A/B testing. If Subject Line A reads, “Exclusive Offer from National Property Inspections,” in Subject Line B, you could try disclosing the offer. For example, “Receive $50 Off Your Home Inspection!”

3. How to Segment: The Ones Who Open None
With The Ones Who Open None, we’ll just cut to the chase: there’s a good chance you’ll have to let them go sooner or later. But hope isn’t necessarily lost for the time being. With those three unopened emails from our original example, you have every opportunity to win them over.

Maybe you just haven’t stumbled upon that one magical subject line. Here’s where A/B testing can work for you again. You can try a new subject line or even a brand new offer on this segment. If a radon test coupon isn’t working out, maybe you could try offering the same amount off of a sewer scan, for example. We should mention that including a list of your more engaged recipients in an email that is intended for the unengaged segment is a good idea since it will help your sender score stay high.

We have to caution, though, that it’s important not to expend too much energy on those who aren’t opening your emails. Not only could it be a futile effort in the long-run (especially if the email address is abandoned), it’ll also have a negative impact on your sender score. It’s best to give it some time, but not too much time, and then prune them from your list. We recommend basing your timeframe on how often you send emails. If you send emails weekly or more often, you might give the non-engagers three months. If you’re a less frequent sender, you might wait six months to a year, at which point you can remove them from your list.

We’ve come to the end of our email marketing series! It’s a lot to take in, we know, and that’s why we’re here to help. Have questions we didn’t cover? Contact the NPI Marketing team for answers to help grow your business.