NFL shop.com did a great job with not only the creative, but the subject line, the time they sent the email, and the segmentation. As far as I can tell only those with a preference set as being a Viking fan received this email.

The subject line was: Your Minnesota Vikings Just Won – Order Now & Get Free Shipping Over $75

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!

Part I – Behavioral segmentation

Behavioral segmentation relies exclusively on subscriber actions, and does not take into account gender, location, age, or other demographic factors. Behavioral segmentation data is based 100% on email activity and can be customized based on a marketer’s needs and how they define certain types of customers. Because this type of segmentation is usually easy to start and update, behavioral slicing represents an easy win for most email marketers.

Here are some common behavioral categorizations that email marketers use to chop up their master subscriber list:

1. New subscribers
   These are newest additions to your list within a certain time period. They should all receive a welcome message explaining or demonstrating the value of your email program.
2. Inactives
   Inactive subscribers are those who have not opened or clicked on an email since a given date. You may consider re-engaging these subscribers with a re-activation campaign, or after a certain cut–off point, remove them from the master file and put them in a secondary list to save money on full-file mailings.
3. Actives
   These represent the subscribers who have opened and clicked on your emails during a recent time period, but have not converted. You might want to test various offers to different subsets of this population and see which is the winning message.
4. Buyers
   Those subscribers who have recently converted are considered buyers. Marketers should consider a recent purchase lifecycle program to encourage repeat purchases. In traditional database marketing 101, your most recent purchasers are your most important ones.
5. Browsers
   People who have opened email but not clicked or converted are considered browsers. You may consider re-engaging these subscribers with a re-activation campaign or special offer to get them engaged with your emails again. You also should keep tabs on how these customers are performing across other channels – they may be using your emails as an informational tool to assist in their in-store purchases, etc.

Other behavioral segmentation schemes include purchase trends (time of year, month, day of the week etc.), number of items purchased, purchase price, anniversary date, browse behavior (i.e. web analytics data), gift lists, email domain, and special programs.

Any way you choose to slice your data, you can be sure that more precise targeting will yield more profitable and engaged customers.