The dream of any digital marketer is an online campaign that makes money while we sleep. Although this is a bit of a mythical quest, cleverly created email marketing campaigns that are built on an architecture of custom segmentation and autoresponders can achieve the closest thing to this dream.

Let me show you how to create a very targeted email lifecycle campaign using custom segmentation and autoresponders to target email subscribers in a highly relevant (and converting) way.

Let’s get to it…

1. Create one or more additional list field(s)

These custom list field help you to capture and track where the email subscribers came from and characteristics of their interaction with your business.

This additional data makes it very easy for you to address you subscribers in a highly personalized and relevant way.

These are unique and discrete identifiers that can be used to identify the creative, the ad position, or the offer that was used to capture the email subscriber.

These kinds of identifiers can also be used to capture additional data (beyond name and email) that you might be requesting on the web form. This scenario often applies to businesses that are capturing emails in conjunction with some larger lead generation campaign.

2. Create custom segment(s)

Using one or more of the custom list fields you created, begin to break up your list into discrete custom segments. Try to be mindful that these segments represent specific and related people.

Be especially careful that these segments don’t overlap, or if they must that you stagger the frequency, so that you don’t accidentally pile a bunch of excess emails into your subscribers’ inboxes.

Here is an example of a custom segment using custom list fields.

Once you have programmed all of your segments you will have several, very targeted and homogenous, consumer groups within your list. Perfect for making your email marketing more relevant.

Try to make sure that all of your email segments are created to separate your customers (or sales leads) in specific groups or personas that have similar needs. This will make it much easier to create highly relevant email marketing campaigns and get the very best performance out of your email marketing list.

3. Create custom email campaigns for each segment

Once you have created all of your custom segments, begin building email campaigns that have specific value for that group of subscribers/customers/leads.

You can build one-off traditional email campaigns and offers for each segment. However, that can be a lot of work to build all of those custom emails. I prefer to create emails that are driven by the custom, relevant, fresh content from my blog (via RSS feeds).

My strategy is to create RSS-driven email marketing campaigns that are additionally driven by custom (persona-based or topic-based) categories on my blog. This makes each segments’ email content custom and relevant to their segment.

One additional tactic I like use is to create custom calls-to-action that are unique to each segment. That way my offers are as relevant and targeted as my content, in each email.

Is all this work worth it?

I’m going to let you make that determination from the results of just one of the email marketing lists that Kaleidico runs with this segmentation and autoresponder strategy.

This first report is our weekly email campaign that is not customized and goes to the entire list. There’s no segmentation and the content is the same for every email subscriber.

We call this a heart monitor email. We are doing less and less of these as we get more sophisticated with segmentation strategies. Its purpose is just to stay in contact with the list, condition them to receive emails from the business, and hopefully deliver them some incremental value until we have something specific to offer them or they need our services. Like a heart monitor, we are just trying to make sure the email list is still beating and alive.

The performance is not horrible and generally gets open and click-through rates on par with industry comparable lists (super cool feature provided by MailChimp).

However, look what happens when we create email campaigns that are built specifically for our discrete segments.

Yes, those are 2-5x increases in open rates and 5-15x increases in click-through rates!

I’m going to end on that big, impressive note. You can see how powerful this strategy is and it’s not an isolated event we are seeing the same results in email list after email list we manage.

Do you have an email list you are struggling with or you just starting to think about using email marketing in your business?

Give us a (no-obligation) call: 313-338-9515 or hello@kaleidico.com.

We’ll give you a little free advice. We love talking about digital marketing and making company’s online channels profitable.