Is relevant email alienating your subscribers?

Offering sacrificial cups of tea to the Goddess of Creativity is my preferred option when staring at the blank piece of paper that is destined to be the next email or blog post.

If her absence, many experts would advise reviewing past content or previous sales offers, noting what got the best response, then using that as a guide for future content and new offers.

It makes intuitive sense: through their past clicking behavior, you let your audience self-select topics and offer types. Hurrah! More relevant emails!

Yes...and no.

The problem is that your audience may share certain characteristics, but not all. Allowing self-selection skews content and offers in favor of the group with the loudest voice, potentially alienating the rest and causing knock-on damage to your deliverability and brand.

Let's explore and explain the point...

The audience for my own newsletter consists of people with a shared interest in email marketing. But within that list are groups with different priorities. Some are focused on deliverability. Others on providing email marketing services. Others have a keen interest in design issues.

In fact, I know that I get the best open and clickthrough rates when I feature articles on email design. The temptation, then, is to put more and more design articles in the newsletter to keep response rates up.

But what that means is that the nature of the email newsletter drifts. It morphs from an email marketing newsletter into an email design newsletter.

The result?

Those folk not focused on design become increasingly alienated. They open less, respond less, delete more, unsubscribe more.

But the design folk are thrilled...they open more, respond more, delete less, unsubscribe less.

The average results spat out by the ESP could mask the fact that we now have list apartheid.

First, we've lost influence on a significant portion of the list.

Second, we've changed the list audience to one that no longer matches the brand or target audience of the associated website or business. (Kevin Hillstrom cites a real-world example in this post.)

Third, we may now have a disconnect between the promises made on sign-up pages and what we actually send. So new subscribers will have false expectations. Which in turn leads to disappointment (bad for the brand), and potentially more spam reports (bad for deliverability).

(Yes, we could change the sign-up copy. But when was the last time you looked at yours? And the process of drift is often a subconscious and subtle one that you're not aware of until it's too late.)

The problem is a kind of negative segmentation. We did the right thing by "targeting" our emails, but we're only targeting one segment of the audience. We forgot to address the targeting needs of the other segments.

So what's the solution?

The cheap and easy one (so mine) is to continue to send a mix of content and offers. Enough variety to keep a majority of the audience happy and engaged in the long-term. (My open rates are not falling.)

The better solution is positive segmentation, where you identify these audience segments and then treat each as their own list, with their own stream of emails.

So I could pick out those subscribers who only click on design articles and send them "design" emails. And the rest of the list gets a more balanced mix of articles. Then everyone's happy.

Segmentation works, but needs thought.

Tags: email segmentation, targeting, email marketing

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