E-mail Marketing: Segment Your Customers With an E-mail Campaign Tree

E-mail provides a one-to-one marketing medium that allows you to deliver a message directly to individuals, speaking to their specific interests, needs and desires, notes Mike Adams, founder and president of e-mail marketing software provider Arial Software. In “Permission Wave,” a guide to effective permission-based e-mail marketing, Adams explains how you can learn a lot about your customers by asking just a few questions via e-mail. He gives the following example:

Say you’re a coffee merchant with 100,000 subscribers to your e-mail newsletter. Ask three questions in three separate e-mails. First ask your subscribers/customers what they purchase your products for and provide four possible answers: personal use, as gifts for others, restaurant use or office use. When your subscribers respond, you’ll now have a segmented list of five separate groups, i.e., customers who didn’t respond at all, and one group for each answer to your question.

Ask a second question regarding favorite coffee blends in a follow-up e-mail with four more responses.

Once you have answers to those questions, customers begin to branch off into segments. Counting answers to the first question, you now have 16 preference combinations. A third question might ask what factors your customers think are important when purchasing coffee. Another four possible answers will result in 64 preference combinations.

Each group should be marketed to differently, notes Adams. Send e-mails that speak to each customer’s area of interest. He cautions marketers to give their customers a few weeks between questions, so they don’t feel pestered. Continue to market to them during this time but stay relevant, he says. “When [the survey is] conducted properly, your customers will greatly appreciate this questioning and won’t find it intrusive, especially if you assure them of this fact with an obvious link to your privacy policy.”

To see other books authored by Adams, visit http://www.truthpublishing.com.