Customize Offers for Each Segment of Your Email List

To increase response rates further, segment your mailing list into groups, based on prior behavior or likely motivators. Then, tailor separate offers and creative approaches that will be especially motivating to each group.

For instance, the students on your email list may be particularly motivated by getting a certificate acknowledging the community service hours involved in completing a task, whereas your most active members might be motivated to even further action if the reward is participation on an "advisory council" conference call with your honorary chairman.

However, to avoid mailing gaps or duplication, your list segmentation should be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

For instance, consider this potential mailing list segmentation:

The preceding list segments are not mutually exclusive because some parents of youth baseball players also serve as coaches and occasionally serve as umpires.

As another example, consider this potential mailing list segmentation:

The preceding list segments are not collectively exhaustive because they leave out registered members of other parties, such as Libertarians and Green Party members, which could represent important swing voters.

On the other hand, here is a segmentation example that is both mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive:

With this segmentation, a school-safety group could avoid alienating their email list subscribers who own guns by appealing to them with different school-safety issues than subscribers who don't own guns.

Here is another correct segmentation example:

Faced with this segmentation, you would be wise to offer unresponsive subscribers something very easy to do, or big rewards for taking their first action. On the other hand, the email alert sent to your most active subscribers might include a call-to-action that is more time consuming or challenging, due to their demonstrated willingness to take action for your cause.