Winter Release: Create Relevant Emails With Segments

Segmentation is one of the keys to relevant email campaigns. It can turn any simple promotional message into something your recipients sit up and notice (and engage with). So how do you craft emails that go from generic to revenue generating? It's not that hard, really.

If you aren't doing any segmentation right now, I recommend starting small/simple. Of course, data is critical for segmentation, but most anything will do: Total Purchase Value, Gender, Region, or even Style Preference.

You probably have much of this data taking up space in your e-commerce database or any other data store. By importing that into your email marketing solution you'll be opening up a world of opportunities. How easy is it to create a segment once you have that data? Dead simple.

For the Bronto Winter 2009 Release we've enhanced the functionality to ensure that our segmentation tool is even easier to use. So let's look at creating a segment based off of style preference - the age old question of boxers or briefs.

Segmentation is as easy as building a sentence. In this case, we are choosing people whose field 'style' is 'boxers'. Done. Now I can easily customize content or mailings to those who prefer boxers. Something as simple as a recipient's preferred undergarment may provide significant lift in conversions.

With on-the-fly calculations (133 in this case), you can see how each rule affects this size of your segment. Not only does this reduce errors and time spent tweaking, it also provides an easy way to gain insight into your contact database.

Once you've created a few simple segments you'll be ready to start getting creative. Add a few rules together, see how they perform. You might get a few duds, but pretty soon you'll be able to target whomever you want, and ROI will be on the rise.

This new segment builder, along with many other improved features, will be available next week as part of the Bronto Winter 2009 Release.

Adam Covati
Product Manager at Bronto