Targeting and Segmentation

MarketingSherpa has a great case study of a retailer that got a 208% higher conversion (purchase) rate for a targeted email sent to a small segment (10%) of their list.

“These types of campaigns appeal to a specific group, and it’s important that we maintain the integrity of our list. Marketing the wrong message to our group is going to increase our unsubscribe rate and [hurt] the response to our emails,” Kimura says.

This story tells us that Artbeads.com is looking at the long term. They’ve discovered that cultivating their email subscribers and catering to their needs is as important as frequency or any other metric for sending email.

Related Posts

No one harvests email addresses any more

There are a lot of people who assert that “no one” actually scrapes websites for email addresses any longer. My experience indicates this isn’t exactly true.
We have a rotating set of email addresses on our contact page. Every day we push out a new email address. Every day we expire addresses that were pushed out 7 days ago.
I can say, with 100% certainty, that there are people harvesting addresses off websites. The ads are reasonably “targeted.” Most of them are offering increased traffic, or the ability to monetize the website. Some are offering work from home.
I suppose you could call these targeted mails. After all, what website owner doesn’t want more traffic? Who wouldn’t want to make hundreds of dollars a day from the comfort of their own couch? What website owner doesn’t want their site submitted to 2700 different search engines?
Targeted spam is still spam. And having a rotating, expiring contact address has kept the amount of spam coming into our contact address low enough that the contact address is actually useable. 10 spams a month (for a 7 day old email address) is much more manageable than 1000 emails a month (for a 4 year old email address).

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Data Cleansing part 2

In an effort to get a blog post out yesterday before yet another doctor’s appointment I did not do nearly enough research on the company I mentioned selling list cleansing data. As Al correctly pointed out in the comments they are currently listed on the SBL. And when I actually did the research I should have done it was clear this company has a long term history of sending unsolicited email.
Poor research and a quickly written blog post led to me endorsing a company that I absolutely shouldn’t have. And I do apologize for that.
With all that being said, Justin had a great question in the comments of yesterday’s post about data cleansing.

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Customized for your profile?

With all the discussion about how daily deal emails are the silver bullet to making a profit on the Internet, I signed up for a couple of lists. Not only did I sign up for different lists, I also signed up for the same lists from different addresses.
One of those programs touts that they send me offers tailored to me. Except that the offers I get at Hotmail are different than the ones I get at Gmail are different from the ones I get elsewhere.
So how tailored is this really? In general there is no difference with how I interact with the mail in those various accounts, so that profile is the same. And, well, the person behind the addresses is all the same. If the ads were specially chosen for me, why am I getting different ones at different accounts? Is this particular marketer simply randomly assigning offers and claiming they’re targeted? How many other mailers claim to send ads tailored to my profile, and then just throw the profile out the window and send whatever they want to send today?
This isn’t to say that there aren’t a some marketers that do pay attention to recipient profiles. But I’m starting to wonder if the majority of “targeting” is more lip service than reality.
What do other people think?

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