Email Applied: How to Use Segmentation to Increase Email Relevance

Marketers have to cut through the clutter with their emails. Yes, you can batch and blast at times, but you'll see higher returns from relevant, targeted emails. A segmentation strategy is vitally important to building long-term relationships with customers and prospects.

How Many Segments?
This depends on your business cycles and needs. There's no reason to go overboard. Some marketers may have 50 or more segments, but realize it takes a lot of time to develop and manage specific content for each group, not to mention making sure everything works right for each permutation. Start with three to five meaningful segments. At the outset, messaging to these targets need not be overly complicated. A marketer might send a standard campaign with only the subject line and the first content clip different for each segment.