By Kara Trivunovic

In the email space, we talk a lot about achieving relevance because, in the end, being relevant is the holy grail of any marketing effort. None of us starts our morning thinking, “What I can send to my customers that they absolutely don't care about?”

We know our customers are not all the same—they engage with us differently, they have been customers for varying periods of time and they likely use different products or services. What we tend to overlook is that our email database has the same varying qualities. Not all email subscribers are created equal.

For example, if you’ve ever spent time evaluating the incremental contribution an email subscriber brings to your bottom line versus that of a nonsubscriber, you know that subscribers tend to drive more revenue. If you haven’t looked at that, now is the time.

Segmenting your audience isn't always difficult, but it isn't necessarily easy either. How you as a brand should approach segmenting your email audience warrants the ever-popular “it depends” response that most experts and consultants like to give, because it really does depend.

But in the interest of providing some guidance, here are three common segmentation points that may apply to your business and don't require an advanced degree in statistical analysis. The relevance they deliver could make the difference in your email programme's success.

Customer status: Understanding the status of the subscriber is critical in crafting your copy. Are they customers, prospects, lapsed customers or lapsed prospects? How often do they open and click email messages from your brand? Imagine the different messages you could convey just on that knowledge alone.

Length of customer relationship: It is logical to expect that customers of a longer tenure tend to be more familiar with the quality of products or services you offer and require less value-proposition messaging and more value-add messaging. This information may drive your frequency of communication as well as the message or content you send along.

Location or geography: If you have bricks-and-mortar locations or seasonally driven products or services, segmenting against the geographic location of your customers allows you to create relevance through proximity and through seasonality. Location-based targeting most often drives the timing of your messages as well as the content.

After you’ve completed the exercise, it’s time to let the analysis begin to determine your best, and most profitable, customers.

Dig in to the details to identify clusters or groups of similar subscribers. Next, create corresponding engagement categories—highly engaged to un-engaged—filing each subscriber accordingly. Now you are on your way to reaching your most valuable email customers.

Leveraging any single piece of this information or any combination thereof will help you understand who among your email subscriber base has influence over their organisations and/or their professional networks.

Not only are you now able to determine who your most valuable email customers are, you know where they are—and knowing where they are drives how you reach them. For some, it may be a combination of email and social programmes; for others it may be event materials and SMS programmes. The integrated communication possibilities are numerous, but you will never get there if you don’t fully understand the data first.

About the author

Kara is Senior Director of strategic services at StrongMail.

About the company

StrongMail provides online marketing solutions for email and social media, enabling businesses to reach, engage and influence their target audience.

http://www.strongmail.com