As any seasoned email marketer knows, there are almost an unlimited amount of ways to segment email marketing subscriber data. In the second installment of this three-part overview, Jordan Lane provides a summary of some common email segmentation sources, tips, and best practices.

Part II – Demographic segmentation

Gender, age, ethnicity, interests, education level, occupation, location, marital status, number of children, and income are all examples of demographic attributes that can be used to effectively segment your email subscribers. Depending on the nature of your business and industry, you can combine such attributes to create highly targeted audiences that really zero-in on your best customers. So why would you target females with your email marketing messages when your best customers are more specifically hispanic females aged 45-60 with a college degree and adult-aged children?

The reason why many fail to use sophisticated demographic segmentation is because they have difficulty gathering all the demographic information they desire from the initial registration page. As a general rule, the more information you require at sign-up, the likelier a prospect will abandon the registration process or provide false information.

To help email marketers gather the info they need for sophisticated demographic information, I’ve compiled a list of techniques to improve the data collection process:

• Don’t ask for demographic information until after the prospect has subscribed to your list. This will help reduce abandoned registration forms.
• Develop a preference center where subscribers can update and add their demographic information. Preference centers can take a good amount of work, testing, and planning, but can pay huge dividends when you learn more about your customer base.
• Use online surveys or sign-up confirmations to request more demographic information from the customer. Here is an example of a welcome email from Bluefly.com where they are not only welcoming subscribers to their list (and offering free shipping) but are also asking for more demographic data. Smart!

• Validate the captured information at the point of entry. A misspelled email address, name, or postal address could mean lost revenue, additional marketing costs, and unhappy customers. Take a look at Experian QAS for email, mailing address, and phone verification technology.
• If you ask for information, you should use it. If a customer lets you know that he loves camping but never receives a camping-related email, an opportunity has been lost and you might betray consumer trust.
• Briefly explain the benefits of providing information to your subscribers. Why should he or she complete this form? What’s in it for the subscriber?
• Send a thank you or confirmation message in a timely manner once the registration is complete. This could be an email or at the very least a simple thank you page once information is submitted.

Once you’ve got your vital customer demographics in place, you can slice and dice your file to your heart’s content. Segment away!

Tags: data capture, demographic segmentation, demographics, email segmentation, qas, registration, segmentation, sign-up

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