Advanced segmentation hacks (complete guide)

One year at the Traffic & Conversions conference here in San Diego, I listened to a mind-blowing talk about segmentation. It wasn’t given by any of the big name marketers in attendance like Frank Kern, Ryan Deiss or Ezra Firestone. It wasn’t Gary Vayernchuk’s inspired keynote speech. I don’t even remember the guy's name but he ran email marketing for Live Nation at the time. Live Nation is a giant concert promoter and Ticketmaster is a subsidiary. They have a huuuuge email list in the millions. And the talk promised to go into advanced segmentation. Me, being the good email marketer I am, brought my notebook along in hopes of being wowed. Segmentation was always something that stressed me out. "How do I make sure the perfect segment of my audience is seeing the most tailored message possible and I'm not bugging them." And, honestly, I ended up writing almost nothing down. I don’t remember the bulk of his speech today. And that’s because he told one story that changed the way I view "advanced" email marketing and segmentation… and nothing else mattered after that. Here’s how it went: Live Nation’s initial segmentation strategy was what you’d expect from a giant company with lots of highly-paid employees… they segmented the crap out of everything. Using all their most advanced tools they knew, for example, if you liked country music and lived in San Diego. So, they’d send you hyper-focused emails about live country shows going on at Petco Park (San Diego’s big stadium). But then one day they decided to try an experiment. They asked themselves, "What if we just send every show to everyone in San Diego?" In other words… no real segmentation anymore (other than making sure it was geographically appropriate). And lo and behold, their open rates didn’t dip. Unsubscribes didn’t skyrocket. And email revenue just went up, up, up. Turns out most people like all different kinds of music, and it was more valuable to just send them every show so they could decide what caught their eye - instead of using all kinds of advanced tools to try to guess what they wanted. Which leads to the most advanced segmentation advice I can give you: don’t do it. You don’t need nearly as much segmentation as you might think when you’re sending daily emails (or really any emails). Almost none of the high-powered email-based businesses I know (that make millions off daily emails) do much if any segmentation. Yes, people might get emails they’re not 100% interested in… but they’ll just skip it. Or delete it. Or unsubscribe. The truth is... the most likely scenario of the above is that they’ll just skip the email and think little of it. I’ll allow you to have one layer of segmentation - and that could be a customer vs a lead. There are scenarios where you won’t want to email your customer a promotion they’ve already seen. But from experience, I’ve found that most customers don’t mind if something slips through the cracks. Or they just quickly skip or delete it if it’s not relevant to them. It all comes down to whether or not the email content is good more consistently than not. If your emails are good and relevant to the vast majority of your readers most of the time, then no one cares if you promote a product they’ve already bought for a few days… Or send something that doesn’t apply to them at their current stage of life… Or whatever thing you feel you need to spend hours segmenting out a small portion of your audience for. More often than not your "advanced" segmentation will just lose you money - and end up biting you in the butt since it just adds another layer of complexity in your marketing stack. Tl;dr: if you write compelling emails, segmentation is practically a non-factor. And in the next email we’ll talk about how you do that - make your emails so compelling that people want to hear from you every day. Cheers! - Derek Sent to: {EMAIL} [Unsubscribe]( CopyHour.com, 340 S LEMON AVE, 5007, WALNUT, CA 91789