Segmentation of e-mail mailing lists is a technique that large organisations regularly employ. It’s a method that is effective no matter how many contacts your mailing list contains. Your online target audience can be treated exactly as you would with your offline business. People like to be treated as individuals, if they feel that communications have been tailored for their personal needs they will feel a stronger relationship towards your organisation.
 
Let’s imagine you owned a public house, you would have regular customers that come in on a weekly or daily basis. Over time you learn what your customers like and you would treat them individually. For example, you have one customer called David. David comes into your pub on Tuesdays for Quiz night and a few drinks. You remember he likes a whisky on the rocks with coke, so before he gets to the bar you say “Hi Dave, the usual?” David likes that you make him feel welcome because you’re anticipating his needs. David also comes in on Sunday for lunch with his family, when he walks in you get a menu ready and let him know what the specials are, without him even asking. You even know when David is with his wife he likes a orange juice, because he has to drive home after lunch and it’s his wife’s turn to have a few drinks. You now have made David’s wife happy as well as David. You also tell David that you have reserved a table for him, right where he likes to sit (so he can see the TV with the sports on). You probably have other regulars which you treat the same as David, although David never notices and feels he gets a friendly service.

This applies online, you have groups of people who have similar needs, treating them individually helps develop your relationship and provide good customer service. This can be applied online by:

• Sending communications to people when you anticipate they will want to receive information, by learning peoples buying habits.
• Some people are more drawn to a bargain or a special deal, others like to purchase one of your more high end products or services as they feel it is of higher quality, these people would probably purchase less often. They could be annoyed by frequent communications and could think they spent £xxx.xx last time they visited, they are not intending to keep spending.
• Visitors from a large city wouldn’t find strong sturdy walking boots useful, whilst the ones who live in more rural areas may be more drawn to this product.
• If a person has only just signed up to your mailing list, and yesterday you sent out a special voucher or deal code to all of your contacts. It would make sense to send this out to all new subscribers until the discount isn’t valid.

These are all examples, and your client base probably has more complex needs. But try to consider segmentation by demographics, geographic location, previous buying habits, online behaviour and track click-troughs and open rates of all email communications that you send.

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