One of the ways to get a better response to your newsletter is by making the content directly relevant to your readers. Ideally, you would like them to consider that your newsletter “is for me”.
You can, of course, do that to some extent when contacting your entire database. You have a feel for what your clients are interested in – in general.
But if you want to make your newsletter even more relevant, it pays to segment that database and send variations of your newsletter to different types of clients. By doing that, you can provide content that is more likely to be relevant to your readers, making it more likely that they will consider the newsletter to be “for me”.
Ways to segment your database
You know your business better than I do, but here are some suggestions for ways to segment your database.
- By demographics: age, whether they have a family, life stage.
- By location: by town or type of home (for real estate agents).
- By product or service bought.
- By recency (how recently they joined your database or bought a product or service from you.)
(Segmenting by recency is worth considering because new names in your database or recent buyers are more likely to be responsive than older names.)
How to use your segments
You can use this new information either to send a more relevant newsletter to each list of clients or to send a newsletter just to one list of clients. The latter strategy can help you save money by avoiding the cost of sending information to your entire database that only a proportion will be interested in.
As you can customize our newsletters as much as you wish, you can tweak the content to match a segment of your database. This might require only a few minor changes, or you might want to replace one article (dip into our library for lots of choices).
With our email newsletters, you can make a copy of a newsletter in your VerticalResponse account, then edit the copy to make it more relevant to your segment. Then, you can either upload a separate list of clients or you can use VerticalResponse’s segmenting tool to divide up an existing list (let us know if you need help with this).
With our print newsletters, you can simply make a copy of the newsletter and make edits to the copy. Because you can print the newsletters in your office, it’s easy to just run off a new copies to each segment – you’re not committed to a large print run.
Alternatively, you could on one month just send print newsletters to one segment of your databases. The newsletters would contain content and offers particularly relevant to that segment of people.
I do this myself, although I know I should do a lot more. For example, I send my print newsletter just to my existing clients and to people who have joined my database in the past few months. This helps me save printing and mailing costs because I am only marketing to those people who are most likely to respond.
If you would like to talk about how to segment your database, please let us know.
