Segmenting Your Email List for Success

You’ve built a list of hundreds, or even thousands of email subscribers interested in your product or service. You’re sending regular emails with specific updates letting them know exactly what’s going on in your organization. You think you’ve cracked the winning strategy, right?

Not quite.

You may notice a number of people unsubscribing from your list after every email blast. This is due in part because you didn’t segment your audience. Segmenting ensures that only specific people who want to see your content see it. 

When it comes to email marketing, put yourself in the shoes of your audience--what would you want to see in your inbox? Click To Tweet                         

The first step you can take is to analyze the emails you send out. Do you send a weekly email regarding events you’re putting on, another for fundraising and a third for general news?

While many of your subscribers will be interested and engaged with all three of these subjects, some may only be interested in one or two.

The best way to filter out who’s who on your email list is to reference back to who has opened what emails in the past. This is a function that should be very easy to do on email newsletter tools such as MailChimp and Constant Contact.

While many of your subscribers will be interested and engaged with all three of these subjects, some may only be interested in one or two.

Keeping with the earlier example, you should create three separate email lists: Events, Fundraising and News. Go through your old sent newsletters, “check all” on the recipients who opened each newsletter, and put those email addresses in the corresponding list.

Now, instead of having one giant list of all of your contacts, you will have three smaller lists of people who have proven that they are interested in the varied and specific emails you are sending them.

What about additional subscribers that you gained? On your website, where you have people sign up for your list, adjust the box so that your new, segmented lists are displayed. There are tools in both Constant Contact and MailChimp to help you do this.

This still doesn’t account for emails acquired through in-person giveaways at events, or “card-in-a-jar” promotions. In this case, there’s no perfect fix unfortunately. Best practice would be to sign these people up for all of your lists, and after about a month, repeat the filtering process again to account for all new emails.

With these tips you should be well on your way to an optimized email program with minimal unsubscribes and engaged readers.

Tags: Ally 360, Constant Contact, Digital Marketing, email, List Segmentation, Mailchimp, marketing, Milwaukee