Avoid Poor Contact List Managment
Have you ever received an email or postcard and thought to yourself. "why would I be getting this"? It's something that I've noticed more and more of lately and felt it was something worth addressing. Email list/contact list management is extremely important, especially when doing any type of mass emailing or mailing.
Grouping your contacts:
It's extremely important when you are running a business that you group your contact lists. Make sure that your customers are in one list, your vendors in another, and your family and friends in yet another. You don't want to be sending sales emails to vendors and funny jokes to customers. The best and probably easiest way to do this is to group your contacts by well defined roles such as customers, vendors, friends, wholesale, etc.
Segmenting your groups:
Now that you have your groups you'll want to look at those groups to see if they can be further segmented. For example if you have a group called customers you may need to further define those customers by type. Lets say you are a sporting goods store you may segment them into indoor, outdoor, male sports, female sports, water, hiking, biking, etc. It's not that people can't be in more then one group but you don't want people in groups they aren't interested in.
Why go through the hassle?
Why not? By grouping and segmenting your contacts you are giving yourself a better chance of matching your emailing/mailing message to the correct person. Now that you have the right message in front of the right person you stand a better chance of converting that person into a repeat customer. Think about it, if you are really into fishing and you get an email talking about the 50% off sale for all fishing gear aren't you at least somewhat interested in what they are offering? I would be. Now think about the opposite, if you get an email about swimming gear and you don't like to swim, that message is completely lost on you.
Won't it take forever to group my contacts?
It may not be a 5 minute process, but after you have the initial grouping done moving forward should be fairly painless. You can also utilize mass emailing programs that allow your visitors to select what information (group) they want to receive.
It's about good customer relations:
Grouping and segmenting your contacts is another way of making sure you are serving your customers in the best possible way. You aren't hassling them with information that doesn't make sense to them, and you make them feel like you really understand their interests.
Remember: It's about providing relevant information to customers, not bombarding them with offers they'll never use.
--------------
Ignite MediaLLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization
Website Packages Now Available!
Grouping your contacts:
It's extremely important when you are running a business that you group your contact lists. Make sure that your customers are in one list, your vendors in another, and your family and friends in yet another. You don't want to be sending sales emails to vendors and funny jokes to customers. The best and probably easiest way to do this is to group your contacts by well defined roles such as customers, vendors, friends, wholesale, etc.
Segmenting your groups:
Now that you have your groups you'll want to look at those groups to see if they can be further segmented. For example if you have a group called customers you may need to further define those customers by type. Lets say you are a sporting goods store you may segment them into indoor, outdoor, male sports, female sports, water, hiking, biking, etc. It's not that people can't be in more then one group but you don't want people in groups they aren't interested in.
Why go through the hassle?
Why not? By grouping and segmenting your contacts you are giving yourself a better chance of matching your emailing/mailing message to the correct person. Now that you have the right message in front of the right person you stand a better chance of converting that person into a repeat customer. Think about it, if you are really into fishing and you get an email talking about the 50% off sale for all fishing gear aren't you at least somewhat interested in what they are offering? I would be. Now think about the opposite, if you get an email about swimming gear and you don't like to swim, that message is completely lost on you.
Won't it take forever to group my contacts?
It may not be a 5 minute process, but after you have the initial grouping done moving forward should be fairly painless. You can also utilize mass emailing programs that allow your visitors to select what information (group) they want to receive.
It's about good customer relations:
Grouping and segmenting your contacts is another way of making sure you are serving your customers in the best possible way. You aren't hassling them with information that doesn't make sense to them, and you make them feel like you really understand their interests.
Remember: It's about providing relevant information to customers, not bombarding them with offers they'll never use.
--------------
Ignite MediaLLC, Ignite Your Site™
http://www.ignite-media.com/
Website Design & Development eCommerce Development Search Engine Optimization
Website Packages Now Available!
Labels: email blasts, email marketing, small business, tips, tricks
posted by Ignite Media LLC at
Monday, February 16, 2009
3 Comments:
Matching the message to the right recipient is key to any marketing communication - email is no different.
Segmenting with as much granularity as possible is crucial. You never want people to feel they're just one of a thousand recipients - even if they are.
It's amazing how many mis-directed emails we get. If the sender took a little time to sort out the contact list, I'm sure they'd see a better click-through rate.
No doubt - I think people get stuck in the numbers game approach to email marketing. Quality is much more important than quantity - a personalized, or at least well-targeted, message is better every time.
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