Treat your contacts well, and you find value in email marketing

Targeted email marketing is still the number 1 ROI in the marketing world today.

Segmenting your list is a great way to enter the world of targeted email marketing. Marketers who target their email blasts gain a foot hold over marketers who do not. 

You can segment your lists in some general ways:

• Industry segmentation
• Geographic segmentation
• Job Title or Role segmentation

Today's marketer will often not be bound by geographic restrictions, so industry- in my opinion- is the best segmentation rule. What is your contact interested in? If you can answer that question, and target your marketing towards a solution- they are looking for- you will have greater success in click-through-rates and conversions.

There is a little bit of work that goes into this. Building out content directed towards your buyer's desired solution requires content. The more relevant content you can generate about your product or solution, the more your buyer will trust you and the more they will seek you out when they wish to solve their problems.

Put yourself in the shoes of your contacts, if you click a link on a website about a specific product, you almost never receive emails about that product, but you do receive general product or solution information from that company. Imagine if you could take that next step and give targeted information to your users based on the content they view. With today's tracking capabilities and gated content, it is easy enough to figure out what people are actually interested in. If you devote the time to populate content on those items and manage to get further information to your contacts, you will have an edge over most companies in the same space.