Bryan Eisenberg on email marketing: “Do massive Segmentation and opt out your list”

Bryan Eisenberg was one of keynote speakers at the Fusion Marketing Experience. The event had a very impressive line-up with experts from all parts of digital marketing. Bryan shared his email marketing tips:

With a presentation on the second day about one of his favorite topics “Always be testing” (also the name of his book). This time Brian referred to Adwords and Pay per Click testing, see that article here.

Email marketing: Do massive segmentation

I got to speak to Bryan a bit more about e-mail marketing. Bryan has been running his own newsletter for years with over 40.000 subscribers. Bryan: “Do massive segmentation. Once you think you have segmented, segment again. And if possible, segment again. In good e-mail marketing, you segment first, and then personalize within that segment.”

Segmenting is a very effective email marketing tactic

And he is right, several kinds of research have shown Segmenting as one of the most effective email marketing tactics. Even more: Testing with Target Audiences (in other words: segment testing) is also found to be very effective. 91% of marketers find segmentation testing effective. That is huge. Testing segmentation is the number one effective testing tactic according to research by Marketingsherpa.

Brian continues on massive segmentation: “For instance, you can personalize an e-mail to people who are interested in tv’s versus stereo’s. Segment your e-mail campaigns to previous customers versus subscribers and know what you will be sending to them. First segment and after that go a level deeper and do more personalization. Use a RFM (Recency, frequency and monetary value) formula to calculate the right TV or bundle to offer and what discount percentage to give.”

List hygiene also counts.

Bryan: “One of the things we did on our own newsletter was to opt a large part out. We had 40.000 people on our list and asked everyone that wasn’t active to opt in again. In 7 months the e-mail list was up to the same size, but much better quality. That means higher open rates and click through rates AND better deliverability. Not enough people do this list hygiene thing. At the very least put them [the inactives] on a separate list. There is a technical term for people that aren’t willing to keep their list clean: Pussies.”

He ends with one last tip: “Never forget old content is new content to new people.”


Image by Remy Bergma


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