Email marketing

Segmentation can help you make sure your emails don’t end up in customers’ spam folders.

As we alluded to in this post on the best times to send emails, timing isn’t the only factor that you could be–or should be–testing to get more ROI from your email marketing. In fact, segmentation is a fantastic avenue to explore.

Segmentation offers a whole slew of benefits. According to data from Lyris, by using email marketing segmentation:

• 39% of marketers increased email open rates.
• 28% lowered opt-out/unsubscribe rates.
• 24% experienced greater revenue.
• 24% increased sales leads.
• 21% experienced greater customer retention.
• 18% reported a greater number of transactions.

Why pass up the opportunity to make your marketing more effective, generate more leads and close more sales?

So, let’s dive into email segmentation. Here are 4 ways that you could segment your emails and how each method has benefited real-life businesses.

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As Scott Stratten pointed out on his Unmarketing blog, it seems like a study is released each week that tells you the best time to send email. For instance:

• This study tells marketers to send email between 12am and 3am.  (Personally, I have never tried this, but it seems like a bad time to me.)
• This one seems more reasonable to me — send email between 8am – 10am or 3pm – 4pm.
• Then there’s this study that suggests 6am – 7am is the best time to send your marketing email.

Confused yet? Probably so.

As a marketer, you’re trying to stay on top of trends, and knowing when to send email marketing promotions is a question marketers have been chasing answers to for years. We’ve even written about it several times on this blog.

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Are the leads coming in, but you’re not sure how to move them from prospect to customer? Are you stumped by thinking of how you can move leads out of early-stage research to a call with your sales team—but without seeming too pushy?

Lead nurturing holds the key to unlocking the true potential of your online marketing efforts.

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You’ve thought about the basics–like security and ease of use–when it comes to picking a content management system for your website. But don’t stop there. Ask these 5 questions to find out how a CMS can help you with online lead generation, customer relationship management and more.

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Threadless is the self-proclaimed purveyor of “the best tees on the planet.”

They also know a thing or two about online marketing.

Check out their October newsletter, and see how they nail email marketing basics and what they can teach small businesses about using email as a marketing tactic.

October email newsletter from Threadless

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MailChimp recently shared some great data on how many emails are sent, per month, to major email providers (in this case, AOL, Comcast, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo).

Last year, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo came in as the top three, and they were pretty much neck and neck. AOL and Comcast took fourth place and fifth place, respectively.

Source: MailChimp

2012 paints a very different picture. This year, Gmail pulled ahead; it’s the clear leader of the pack. In July 2012, Gmail received more than 536 million emails, while Hotmail received about 428 million emails. Yahoo came in around 385 million emails.

Source: MailChimp

Source: MailChimp

But what does this all mean for email marketers?

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