Avoiding list clutter may not sound like the sexiest of topics, but it’s nonetheless a critical part of every email marketer's routine tasks. Managing a segmented audience for targeted and personalized messaging can quickly become a burden if you’re not careful. A well honed data management strategy can go a long way towards improving engagement too.
But with a few simple tricks and automated actions, managing a diverse audience gets a lot more...well...manageable. Before we get started, let’s first look at why segmentation works.
Why Segmentation Improves Results
Sender Reputation/Sender Score is really where Dynamic Segmentation comes in. Reputation systems (spam filters) place heavy emphasis on recent recipient interaction. It’s not enough to assume that all opt ins, or prospects from a past trade show want your next message.
Dynamic Segmentation implements a rolling filter for recently engaged recipients within your audience. Since mailbox providers are keeping track of how recipients interact with your offers when they decide whether to put your message in the inbox or not, Dynamic Segmentation makes sure you play by their rules, automatically.
Taking this idea a step further with Tags and Preference Centers, as you’ll see below, we find that treating an email list as individuals, each with their own tastes and preferences, enables personalized interactions with recipients, each at their own level.
At its simplest, inbox delivery is about sending relevant messages to people that want them today. If someone opted in a year ago but hasn’t opened any messages in the past 3 months, we can all agree that, in most cases, they are less likely to engage with today’s offer as the person who signed up a month ago and has opened the last 3 offers.
Dynamic Segmentation can handle the engagement filter while Tags and Preference Centers enhance segmentation in simple but meaningful ways that allow you to prioritize delivery efforts for recipients that are most interested. Not only that, but identifying people who are not as interested allows you to target them with special offers that help them re-engage.
Personalized delivery lets you target all your recipients in the most effective way possible and can increase delivery performance for all your segments.
Let’s take a look at the Tools available to us:
- Tag based Preference Centers
- Tag on Import
- List Split Tool
- Tag on Merge
- Event Driven Tagging
Tags
are a great way to manage different types of clients in the same list. Unlike List Segments, which rely on a field in the List, multiple Tags can be added to a single recipient record, allowing for greeting filtering later on.
Tag Based Preference Centers
Preference Centers enable senders to Tag, track and target recipients by their interests. We make the flexible so you can set up a Preference Center for :
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You are in full control of your Preference Center settings so you can tailor the Tag based segmentation to any need.
Tag on Import
Sometimes you just need to add Tags to a set of addresses that you’ve already imported. The Tag on Import process lets you do this easily. Import a list of addresses to a current List in ReachMail, and use the Tagging options to update the existing records.
This lets you pre-define which set of recipients need to be Tagged.
If you need to Tag every recipient in a List, there is an option for that on the Tags page as well.
List Split Tool
Sometimes you just need to break up a List into smaller parts. Whether you want to stagger delivery over a longer time period or simply limit the number of responses you get from a special offer, the List Split Tool is a quick way to break a list into virtual chunks.
By using Tags, your List stays intact (keeping all the engagement history in one place). Scheduled Campaigns and Auto Messages can use these Tags to segment recipients.
Merge and Tag
For anyone that hasn’t used Tags before, this feature is a huge help. Managing dozens of individual Lists can get tedious fast. By merging many Lists into a single List using Tags, senders can quickly reorganize extensive List portfolios into more manageable amounts.
Take the case of a Customer A who attended a trade show last month and also signed up via website sign up form. Instead of keeping two Lists, one for the trade show and one for form opt-ins, the Merge and Tag feature enables you to keep the customer in a single List while maintaining the initial segmentation.
Event Driven Tagging
ReachMail lets you Tag recipients automatically based on events (actions) in your Campaigns. When someone opens a particular message, we’ll add the Tag of your choice to their record. You can even do it on specific link clicks too.
With event driven tagging, ReachMail enhances your targeting options in a simple but powerful way.
Campaign Templates
While not a segmentation feature, per se, Campaign Templates are handy for saving your presets if you want to quickly reuse them later.