How to Avoid Overmarketing The Wrong People

Every year around this time the mail gets heavier and more challenging to bring in. You know what I’m talking about.

Catalogs.

Just because we bought something from a New England clothing retailer a few times, doesn’t mean we want to see a catalog every week between Thanksgiving and December 26. I like hearing from those perfectly-coiffed New Englanders, it just gets to be a little much around end-of-year holidays.

When we talk to clients about running email campaigns for their offers, the same reaction comes up in them: they don’t want to be throwing unwanted catalogs at their readers.

This is a justifiable concern. Yet if you hold back from sending out emails, you don’t see the results come in.

And the problem gets more complicated.

Maintaining Cash Flow Throughout the Year

Any business needs to have a steady flow of clients and customers throughout the year. You might have a great response to an offer one month, but then next month, or three months later, you’ll need more clients coming in.

Unfortunately, if in the process of getting that first great response, you also turned off the folks on your list who weren’t interested in that offer, they might not be listening to the next offer you make, which is on a different topic and one they might really need.

Your clients need different offers, but they don’t want to be overwhelmed with offers that don’t concern them.

What to do? What to do?

It’s Called “Segmentation”

In the course of starting nearly any kind of business, one of the very first things we want folks to invest in, along with a website, is an autoresponder service.

An autoresponder service will, at the most basic level, allow handle the entire process of folks subscribing, and unsubscribing, to your email list. In addition, it should allow you to send both broadcast emails and follow-up emails. Broadcast emails are sent once at a particular date and time to anyone who is subscribed at that moment. Follow-up emails go out as people subscribe, so if someone subscribes today, they receive a follow-up email immediately, the same one that the person who subscribed last year received when they subscribed.

For our purposes today, you want to get slightly more sophisticated than that. This means that you’ll have more than one email list.

You’ll have the main list for your normal weekly or monthly email communications with your entire list. And you’ll have a second list that is specifically for a particular offer.

You may have noticed that recently, during our promotion for Opening the Moneyflow 2012, we offered an Opening the Moneyflow Free Learning Series. It addressed the same problem that the year-long program addresses, and people signed up. Over 800 registered for that series, which was fantastic, yet that was a small percentage of our entire email list.

We started the series on November 9 through this past Friday, December 2. During that time we only sent a few additional emails to our entire list. None of those emails were inviting people to consider the year-long program. All of them were offering free content- an interview, two free teleclasses, and other things we were sending out with the free learning series.

During that time the free learning series was going on, delivering a lot of content to the 800+ people who actually wanted it. 
The result? Grateful emails, happy people. And we have way more applications to our year-long program than we have spots.

Segmenting is a fantastic tool, and yet there are at least two times when I wouldn’t want you to segment.


The Two Reasons Not To Segment Your List.

If your list is, say, under 250 people, then segmenting may not be a useful thing to do. Lists of that size tend to have a very high proportion of friends, past and current clients, and other people who already have a very high opinion of you.

Assuming your offer is one your audience wants, it’s likely that a high percentage of those 50-250 people will either be interested in the offer, or care enough about you that they will pass on news of the offer to people they know.

Once your list gets much beyond 200, you can assume that there are enough strangers on the list, folks who don’t yet know you well, that it might be a good idea to segment.

By the way, 200 is not a scientific number, it’s my intuitive generalization. Your mileage may vary.

The second reason not to segment is if your offer could speak to anyone in your audience. Any individual work falls in this category. Acupuncture, coaching, a consultant who customizes their work for each client, any offer where you would be working with a single client is an example of this.

If you have 5 client slots open, you want your entire list to know about them, so don’t segment.

So now you know how to avoid drowning your audience in catalogs. Please feel free to forward this blog to any retail catalogs you find in my mailbox.

Your turn. If you’ve segmented, how has it worked for you? If you haven’t, what could be your first segment? And what’s your experience of being segmented?