Email marketing is a powerful and effective way to communicate with your subscribers and promote your products. There are many marketers who simply add subscribers to their lists week in week out and send out generic emails to each and every one of them. The problem with this is that sending the same message or promotion to everyone means that it will not resonate with many of them and so the email is effectively wasted.

The solution to this is to segment your subscriber list into sub-lists so that you can tailor specific messages to each group for maximum effectiveness. There are several ways you can segment your list, but here are 5 which tend to get the best results.

#1 Buyers of Specific Product Lines

Some marketers segment merely between buyers and prospects and whilst it is step in the right direction you should go even further. If you have several product lines, you should segment buyers by which ones they purchased so that you promote other products to them instead of the ones they have already bought.

#2 Open Rates

Your email autoresponder service should have the capacity to give you data which will include the frequency with which each subscriber opens your emails. Knowing this will allow you to send differently crafted emails to the segments which do open regularly compared to those that don’t. The objective is to improve your open rates amongst the latter group.

#3 Demographics

Being able to use this form of segmentation may require some data analysis as it is not always possible to determine the demographic of an individual from their email address. It may be that you survey your subscribers, or amend your opt-in form to ask for more details. Once you have the data you could segment by age, education level, gender, or occupation for example, and word your messages to appeal to each specific demographic.

#4 Subscription or Buyer Channels

This works best if you have subscribers opting into your list from multiple channels which include both free and paid traffic. The characteristics of your subscribers will vary greatly depending on the sites they were visiting when they opted in. For example, those that arrived at your site due to seeing a paid ad on their Facebook news feed, are likely to have different likes and wants to subscribers who were already on someone else’s list and saw a solo ad in one of their emails.

#5 Average Order Values

This is one way in which you segment those subscribers which have bought from you. It may be that some went for your top priced products without needing any persuasion. There may be other buyers who, despite being on your list for many years, have only ever spend a few dollars. Segmenting these into sub-lists gives you the opportunity to write promotions differently to ensure order values either increase or in the case of high-value buyers, remain high.