The best way to keep your email program for falling into the dreaded "bulk email marketing" category is by segmenting your subscribers into groups and sending targeted email messages to each. In a perfect world, everyone would have lots of subscriber data to segment on--purchase data, demographics, online behavioral information and more. In reality, many organizations don't have this kind of data, can't link it to their email marketing database, or don't have the resources available to analyze the data and create meaningful segments.
If your organization doesn't have robust subscriber data for segmentation, start with a straightforward segmentation approach. Look at your subscriber list and determine which subscribers are engaged and which are unengaged. In other words, determine who is still opening your email and clicking on links, and who isn't. Most email marketing software has the ability to show you who is opening and clicking on your email, and who isn't, and this is a great place to start experimenting with segmentation.
So what defines engaged and unengaged? Our general recommendation is to consider anyone who hasn't opened or clicked on an email of yours in 90 days to be unengaged (assuming you send weekly or more often) but your specific list may require you to change that definition to meet your needs. Experiment with different time intervals and click and open rates until you have two subscriber groups you're comfortable using.
When you've defined your two groups, you can begin testing different approaches to improve performance--especially with the unengaged subscriber groups. Do they open more regularly if you reduce frequency? Do they respond to different subject lines or special offers? Can you re-engage them with a survey or re-engagement campaign? Track and measure the performance of each segment, and keep improving the tactics that work the best.
Targeted email marketing isn't always easy, but leveraging the data
you have at hand--like subscriber engagement--can yield great results.
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