After completing that integration, I thought it would be useful to offer some background on why it’s so important, and how you can approach list segmentation in your business.

Segmentation defined

My first encounter with segmentation came as I marketed a product to owners of SUVs back in the mid 1990s. I discovered that there are companies whose entire business model is to maintain large lists of individuals, addresses, phone numbers and so on along with a type of meta information, such as where they shop and what car they drive. They even claimed to tell me that I could target owners of a specific model SUV within a zip code region. Wow.

In internet marketing, segmentation takes many forms, including targeted search traffic, strategic joint ventures and, quite importantly, segmenting your own email lists. The most successful marketers manage their email lists in such a way that they can send different messaging to each lead, prospect and customer.

Desired benefits of segmentation

Profit should be the focus behind segmenting your email list. When done properly, segmentation can allow you to craft messages and offers that are most likely to be accepted by a group of people.

Many of the best sales people will tell you that every pitch is individual. While that’s not possible (strictly speaking) in direct marketing where an offer is being presented to thousands or even millions of people, the aim is to get ever closer to a customized pitch for each prospect.

Technology

Technology is becoming more and more sophisticated in its ability to deliver unique, personalized messages to each person on your list, which gets you closer and closer to the individual pitch that sales professionals know closes more sales.

At the same time, you run the risk that you’re messaging becomes unnatural and contrived. Just because technology allows you to insert customized variables, such as name, email address, dates and so on, doesn’t mean that it will enhance your message.

Always run your messaging through your ‘real person’ filter. By that I mean that technology should enable communication, not define it. Don’t do something just because you can, make sure that it ends up looking like something that one real person would actually send to another person.

Two extremes

As we look at the spectrum of uses of technology, there are extreme cases. Some marketers put everyone that ever showed interest in their product on a single list. Whether they buy one offer or another, they stay put on that one single list. Other marketers create labyrinthine frameworks that infer interest based on every click in an email, thereby changing the future messaging for that individual.

Neither extreme strikes me as being effective. In the simplistic single list case there are many missed opportunities where individualized messaging might better resonate with a group. In the second case there is an assumed intimacy that rarely exists between a marketer and a group. In other words, it’s difficult to verify that what you assume an individual is thinking when he clicks one thing and not another is accurate.

Problems with multivariate testing

Which brings me to the vagaries of multivariate testing. In it’s simplest form, testing takes on an A/B question. Two options are presented to large populations and whichever form, A or B, produces the highest response is considered the winner. Typically an A/B test will involve the change of a subject line or an image with all other elements remaining fixed.

On the other hand, if you attempt to test a simple combination of Headline and image, assuming you have two of each, you now have four possible combinations. With four possibilities, the number of people that see each one shrinks. Smaller groups make the results statistically more difficult to distinguish. As a result, the more intricate your triage process the more opportunity for error.

Autoresponders

The good news is that most autoresponder services provide built in mechanisms for sorting through your lists and communicating in both broad and specific ways. When you’re evaluating email services, make sure that the type of segmentation you want is easily accommodated with the solution you choose.

Conclusions

Email list segmentation is an integral part of effective marketing. Finding the proper balance of segmentation and ensuring that your criteria for sorting an individual into one group as opposed to another are effective will require finesse and careful attention. In every case, the outcome is almost certain to be market dependent and so for each new market approached you should expect a settling time to find an effective groove.

Membership websites

As I mentioned, my reason for writing this article is that I just finished extending one of the better membership frameworks available for WordPress to accommodate segmentation. Segmenting visitors, from free members from premium members is a key component to building an effective sales funnel and retention strategy for any membership website.

The reason I wanted to post it here is that it turned out to be a good tutorial about using a fantastic free tool (Inkscape) to create graphics for your website. I actually show you how to use Photoshop too.

You can download the HD version below the video. If you watch it on the page, click the full screen button so that you get all the details.

Download in HD

• Aweber
• InfusionSoft

In fact, Jeff Walker (the fame of http://www.productlaunchformula.com and http://www.sixinseven.com), went to the trouble to have aweber clone their service under the domain name http://www.profollow.com.  I’m not sure when he did this, but he made a big deal about it when he originally launched Product Launch Formula 2.0 in April of 2008.

He actually promised a bonus for anyone that signed up with profollow.com which would be a collection of videos showing how he used the aweber service and how to do e-mail marketing the “right way”.  Since everyone agreed that Aweber was all the rage, I was deciding whether I should use Jeff Walker’s private label version or the regular deal.

So I finally signed up with profollow.com so that I could get the videos.  As it turns out, the bonus never materialized.  On July 16th, 2009, Jeff’s assistant Betty sent me this:

“Yes, it will be about 3 weeks before Jeff will have time to look into
this… you haven’t missed anything and it is on his list of things.
He hasn’t forgotten about it.”

So I waited, but it never came.  Oh well, so what.  It was unexpected since Jeff claims to be so big on over delivering and even providing additional unannounced bonuses.  I suppose it might be that he just didn’t get enough people signed up to justify the time to make the videos based on the money he makes reselling Aweber.  After all, he’s done a few more launches of PLF and related coaching, seminars, etc. since then.  Can’t fault a guy for chasing the money.

It probably would have slipped from my mind (like it probably did from the minds of the others that use profollow), except that I’ve been having trouble with Aweber (profollow) today and I’m wondering if it’s time to move on.  Usually they’re pretty sharp, but they don’t seem to give much credence to what I say or ask.  They just make the changes they like and seem to say “live with it”.

For example, in the last few weeks they rolled out a new webform module that embeds a whole bunch of junk CSS and other stuff to format it.  I suspect that a lot of their users don’t even know why this wouldn’t be a good thing, but I have a few gripes about it (including page bloat, SEO and getting it to fit with an existing style on my site).  When I asked if there was some way to go back to the old way they simply say “No”.  That’s it.

So what’s so bad about it?   I’ll just list out the things bother me about aweber (that I can remember right now):

• Their JavaScript web form generator is blocked by ad blocking plugins and software, which means that anyone using the JavaScript to embed an Aweber opt in form may be missing a percentage of web surfers.  Fortunately for them, most web users aren’t savvy enough to use ad blocking software (I would guess 20% or less of the web surfing population).
• Their new webforms embed a bunch of CSS (9KB worth of stuff), which may or may not play well with wordpress and/or custom pages on my site.  I would rather just have the html form details and let my site CSS trickle down to format that form too, so it fits in.  If it’s going to be on every page I also don’t want the bloat there to meddle with my SEO efforts.
• They provide very little control over when to send e-mail.  I can’t send two separate e-mails immediately.  I can’t decide what time of day to send an e-mail or what day of the week.  This may have changed recently as a paid upgrade, but the last time I asked support it wasn’t possible.  Even this open source autoresponder allows you to choose down to the exact minute that a message should go out after some threshold time has been met…
• I can’t delay the welcome message to accomplish a committed list type of function.  This is where I want someone to sign up on a list that is only a stepping stone list.  They should only receive e-mail on that list if they don’t progress on to the next list.  Why can’t I delay the welcome message or just skip it?
• Aweber doesn’t provide secure forms, so that if I want to embed a form into a secure page on my site, or post from a secure page, site visitors will get the impression that I’m submitting their information insecurely to a third party.  This seems crazy since a secure certificate is as little as $30/year.  Why wouldn’t they allow for secure opt in?
• Another secure/non-secure issue is that if I do have a secure site and someone opts in to my list, even when I have confirmed opt in turned off, aweber will send a confirmation message.  This is a bit of a limitation of SSL, since they can’t get all the information they need from the page (or so they say), but it’s a bother still the same.
• Their HTML editor for e-mail messages makes including personalized details in URLs impossible.  For example, let’s say I wanted to produce a URL that would customize the content on a page on my site, so I would include their name or e-mail address.  Well, their HTML editor messes up the URL so that it doesn’t work. (post a comment if you want further explanation).

I can’t remember other issues right now (just as well I suppose).  So what about InfusionSoft?  Well, I suppose if I had a bundle of money I could go with them.  They add a ton of value, but they charge for it too.  I do think I’ll end up there someday, but while I’m on the unlimited plan with aweber, I just can’t beat the price for the features with another paid plan right now.  I’m also not interested in maintaining the software on my own servers, though I have done this, I do believe that the performance and deliverability would degrade as my lists sizes increase.

On the whole, I am satisfied with Aweber, even though sometimes it seems that they are missing some pretty standard features and control (or that their support doesn’t care what I think).  For the price I’m paying and the deliverability I get, I don’t think I can beat them right now.

If you know of another e-mail host that has “fixed” the issues I mention above with Aweber, leave a comment and a link.  If I just missed the Jeff Walker videos that he promised as a profollow bonus, then let me know.  I would love to hear what he has to say about e-mail marketing, especially if he’s going to give tips about how to build the story and build relationships.  Those are two things I think he’s good at, if he would just make those videos.

(By the way, I use profollow to manage my list.  profollow is a private label of Aweber).