Segment and Stagger
Your First Key to Email Marketing Success

 

Every email marketing platform gives you data. But what does this data mean, what do you do with it?  How does this information help you improve your marketing?  How do you use it to make money?
In this report I'm going to show how you use two pieces of information provided by most email systems. I will introduce you to a technique that uses your email data to improve your marketing and lead to some sales.

Just to be clear

As the Vice President of Pixl Inc., I am familiar with our email platforms, bizMail and bizMail+. The steps shown in this report are taken from bizMail. Your email platform may be different but the technique and ideas are universal and can be used with any email platform.

Technique #1
Segmentation and Staggered Deliveries

This technique takes advantage of the fact that most emails are opened within 24 hours. People check their email multiple times a day. So if they are going to open your email, most of them will do that in the first 24 hours. A few prospects won't get to their email until day two or three. Overall by day three you will have captured 99% of all your opens.

You are going to take advantage of this pattern to learn a lot about your target audience and your campaign's performance.

Step One
Segment and Build Multiple Lists

 

Let's say you sell industrial shelving. You search your database and sort out three mailing lists. List one is all warehouse managers. List two is the supply chain executives like the VP of Logistics and Operations. List three is all the Owners and CEOs of the same companies.

Step Two Build Your Campaigns You write one email promoting your best line of shelving and how it's easy to set up and holds more weight than your competitors. Then you build three campaigns, one for each list and all of them using that email you just wrote.   Step Three Staggered Deliveries Now all you have to do is stagger the deliveries, you'll see why in just a minute. On day one you send campaign #1 (managers). On day four you send campaign #2 (execs). On day seven you send campaign #3 (owners/ceo's).   Step Four Understanding the Data bizMail keeps a running tally of your deliveries and opens (this is true of most email systems). Remember that by day three you've captured all your opens and can see how well your campaign performed. Let's say by day three you successfully delivered 1000 emails and got 150 opens. That translates into a 15% open rate with those warehouse managers. On day six you check your data again. This time you have 2000 successful deliveries and 240 opens. Remember that your email data is a running total. So you have to subtract the previous tally (1000 delivered / 150 opened) from this total to find the results. This tells you that you successfully delivered 1000 emails to the executives and got 90 opens for a 9% open rate with the executives. You repeat this again on day nine. This time your tally is 2750 deliveries and 285 opens. Again you subtract the day 6 totals (20,000 deliveries / 240 opens). You see that you successfully delivered 750 emails and got 45 opens. That's a 6% open rate with the Owners/CEOs.

 

So overall your shelving campaign hit a 285 opens on 2750 deliveries for an open rate of about 10%. The individual campaigns achieved open rates of 15%, 9% and 6%.

But what does this tell you? It tells you that your email performed best with the warehouse managers. More than twice the response compared to the Owners/CEO's and much better than the executives. Looks like you have a winning email.

Those warehouse managers are interested in shelving that's easy to set up and holds more. So write another one, maybe highlight how easy it is to change configurations and sizes. But get back to those managers with more performance featured emails right away.

However those executive types aren't reacting as well. These guys and gals are watching the purse strings so hit on that and see if the response improves. Try a new email featuring the cost savings or express shipping or how you offer financing.

 

With this simple technique of "segment and stagger" you can learn all kinds of valuable information about your campaigns and your prospects. You can do it with the standard data most any email platform provides. Over time you can improve your email responses and learn more about your market segments. If you continuously improve your marketing you can continuously improve your sales. And that's your goal isn't it?