Activity Based Segmentation Is the Future of Email

I am quoting here an article of my colleague Neil M. Rosen president/CEO of digital marketing solutions provider eWayDirect. about Activity Based Segmentation:

"E-mail marketers have typically focused on using demographics to segment lists: gender, age, geographic location, and the like. But that’s all about to change. 

This year we’re going to see a strong shift to activity-based segmentation, which relies on actions—such as who opens, and clicks, and buys, and visits Web sites—to determine how often to contact customers and prospects and which campaigns to send them.

One reason for the shift is that ISPs are now blocking companies based on inactivity—in other words, if they e-mail to too large a group that has had zero activity. Therefore you need to maintain high levels of activity among your e-mail recipients by ceasing to mail to people who don't respond 

Over the years, the ridiculously low cost of deploying e-mails has encouraged even experienced marketers to forget almost everything they had learned about best practices. Instead, they just blasted away. There was no need to prequalify leads, qualify customers, use behavioral targeting, or follow any other e-mail best practices, because overdeploying had such a minor effect on the bottom line. And to add insult to injury, over the short term, the more e-mails you blasted out, the more revenue you generated. Volume was (and still is) the number-one driver of sales.

But over the longer term, this practice stands to hurt marketers, and the biggest reason is that it annoys people. Each day, each week, each month, a few more people are unsubscribing in disgust, eventually creating an army of detractors capable of deteriorating the value of a brand. And in the new era of social marketing, there are forums in which they can voice their negative opinions.

And as important as it is that ISPs will start to block a company’s mailings due to overdeployment, and online reputation sites will devalue the brand due to overdeployment, and unsubscribes and complaints will rise due to overdeployment, all of these negatives pale in comparison to the fact that you are simply annoying your prospects and customers.

All this to say that e-mail marketing based on activity is the way companies build solid long-term relationships with their customers and prospects and protect their brand reputation. And it needs to start the very day a prospect raises his hand and asks for more information about your company.

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