Using Segmentation to Survive – and Win – the Inbox War
If you are not segmenting your list or if you don’t have a solid list hygiene procedure, it’s almost certain that most of your email messages are heading for the junk folder or worse, en masse.
To add to this concern, many Email Service Providers (ESPs) are still using obtusely inaccurate metrics that allow them to claim great delivery rates. I have personally used more than 12 different ESPs in the last 11 years and none of them claimed anything other than great deliverability. It is simply not the truth.
For many ESPs, the delivery rate is calculated as the number of emails sent minus the emails received back from subscribers’ mail servers that are marked as having dead or undeliverable addresses.
What this hides is that even when email subscribers send messages straight to a bulk mail folder or trap them, the sending mail server counts them as messages that have been received. In other words, sent, received and delivered is not the same thing.
Even the term “delivered” involves a world of considerations. Are messages delivered to a spam trap, a junk folder or to the inbox? If delivered to the inbox, are the images visible? Are the links working? Has your email been pushed to the bottom of the pile?
All this is why it is so vital that you segment your database and target your messages to meaningful subscriber groups. Segmentation increases the relevance of your messages and dramatically lifts the likelihood that your subscribers will engage with your communication.
Segmentation has, until recently, been considered a best practice. However, it is rapidly becoming a mandatory requirement to ensure your brand’s digital survival. Marketing email is now being judged for delivery or for junking by the major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) according to the level of engagement your subscribers have with your messages.
Factors like open and click rates are already major considerations in the filtering process. Whether subscribers mark your email as trustworthy or hit the spam button also directly affects whether your messages make it to the inbox or not.
It is the mandate of every ISP to reduce the amount of spam and the perceived clutter in their users’ inboxes. ISPs and their postmasters are constantly seeking more data to use in discriminating against email that their users are not interested in.
Segmentation and providing more relevant messaging to subscribers is now more than a moral imperative. It is necessary for your digital survival.
How to Segment, and Why
Segmentation starts at the point of opt-in. When people are opting in, you have a unique opportunity to collect the vital data you need to know about them. How many questions you can ask before subscribers get turned off is widely debated. For instance, I recently created an opt-in profiling process that takes no less than seven pages and around 12 minutes to complete. Prevailing wisdom suggests that this process is too long, that subscribers would never stick around long enough to complete it. Actual evidence contradicts this assertion.
In this case, such a long process works because it was developed from the point-of-view of the subscriber, showing or hiding questions depending on information provided in a previous answer. So if, for example, someone tells us that she is 80 years old and retired, we don’t ask how many children she has under the age of five. The end result is a survey that makes sense and doesn’t require subscribers to continually answer questions that are of no relevance to them.
You may not have the resources to develop an opt-in process at this level of sophistication. But you should collect as a minimum the following information:
• Age
• Gender
• Zip/Postal Code
• Job Function
These four data points will allow you to extrapolate out more complex assumptions about your subscribers. For example, if I know a subscriber’s zip or postcode and job function, I can fairly accurately determine his or her annual income. This is important because, when asking subscribers directly to provide their income, we get answers that are likely not true. For whatever reason, people tend to lie about their income but not about their location or job function.
When collecting information about age, use year of birth as a minimum. That way you can still calculate age accurately 10 years from now for subscribers still in your database. Although collecting birth month and date is more ideal, asking for full date of birth can be a concern for people worried about identity theft.
Gender is important, too, especially since males respond completely differently to non-relevant email messages than females. Our experience has shown that it is essentially a waste of time to send males female-centric promotions. At the same time, females tend to be less reluctant to consider offers that are targeted to males.
Asking about job function rather than industry is considerably more useful if you have to decide between one and the other. By having a granular list of job functions, you can create segments or groups that aggregate them into meaningful segments such as “IT decision-makers” or “frequent business travellers.”
For personalization purposes, I also collect first name and last name. Address data is also helpful, especially if you have a process in place to validate postal data as it is entered. This will ensure a clean database that will save you time and money in the long run.
Marital status is also useful for determining what products and or services people will subscribe to or be likely to purchase.
Segmenting with Psychographic Data
Psychographics are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests or lifestyles. One of the most effective ways to obtain psychographic information from your subscribers, clients and/or prospects is to survey them. Well-designed survey questions will give you valuable insight into what your subscribers value. Survey data can also be used to give feedback on your products and services in order to shape their development going forward.
Psychographic data identifies useful segments that, when overlayed with demographic and behavioural data, can be used to effectively score a subscriber’s likelihood of engaging with a product or service.
In addition to surveys, psychographics can also be obtained during the opt-in process or post sign-up from preference centres.
An important caveat here is that what people think they want and what they actually want is sometimes not the same thing. I see consistent evidence of this in one of the consumer databases I work with: people who say they are interested in weight loss are in fact less likely to engage with email messages on the subject than the general population.
Segmenting by Behaviours
Proactively targeting subscribers based on their recent behaviours can also dramatically increase the results from your email messaging. At its most basic level, triggering email to go out on the anniversary of opt-in creates uplift in deliverability for two reasons. First, the time that the trigger email goes out has a higher likelihood of corresponding to the time when the subscriber is typically engaged in such a way to take the time to read the message. Second, the fact that these emails are triggered individually and not in bulk means that there is no sending volume threat to the receiving ISP, which massively increases the chances of the message being delivered to the inbox.
In my experience, sending the same message triggered instead of in bulk routinely delivers a 3 to 400 percent uplift in open and click rates. This remains true even when the subscriber has opted in very recently.
Using analytics tags to trigger email sends raises the bar yet again. By having simple JavaScript tags loaded on your website or parts of your site, you can easily create a page or cart abandonment program, or target people who have been to a certain number of pages in a certain section. For example, you could send a recovery message to subscribers who have entered items in the shopping cart but did not make it to the confirmation page.
More commonly used is targeting subscribers based on their interactions with your email messages. A good email program will allow you to target subscribers who have/ have not opened a message or series of messages and/or clicked any link. A great email program will allow you to target subscribers who clicked a specific link or, even better, an aggregate set of links.
Going a step further, a really great enterprise email program will provide it all – the ability to target subscribers who visited one page on your site and clicked a particular button, and who clicked on a certain set of links in the last 60 days, and who prefer open-toed shoes but have not bought a pair of shoes in last three days. Such a program will then render different content according to whether subscribers are on the west coast or the east coast and will point them to a store that is closest to their postal code cluster. Of course, it will also personalise the email to their preferred first names and link them to an “update my preferences” page.
And that’s the answer to not just surviving, but winning, the inbox war.
