If email marketing isn’t just a hobby to you, then you should segment your mailing list.
If you apply the best practices in list segmentation, that helps you decrease the unsubscribe rate and get better results by sending very targeted marketing messages to groups of subscribers.
Today I’ll tell you about an unexpected side effect that many email marketers aren’t aware of. A negative side effect…
First of all, let’s make sure that we’re on the same page. So let’s see an example of segmentation.
Example of Email List Segmentation
Let’s suppose that you have a mailing list in the internet marketing niche. Internet marketing includes many sub-niches and not everyone is interested in all of them.
For example, you could segment your list into 4 sub-lists:
– social media marketing
– email marketing
– affiliate marketing
– search engine marketing
Based on your analysis that may include subscribers’ past activity (clicks, opens), you notice that SEO isn’t John’s cup of tea. So you add John to all sub-lists except for the last one.
As a consequence, John’s email address is included 3 times in 3 different sub-lists. When you send marketing messages to the 4th list, John doesn’t get them. Everyone is happy.
The Problem of the Duplicate Email Addresses
If your email marketing company isn’t an obscure one, there’s no problem in segmenting your email list and having duplicate email addresses in various sub-lists.
However, some email marketing companies, for one reason or another, have in place a policy that you may or may not like but you should be aware of anyway…
MailChimp treats each list in your account as a completely separate entity, and counts each subscriber toward your total subscriber count. Duplicate subscribers are included in your total subscriber count. For example, if a subscriber’s email address appears on three different lists, it is counted three times. Source: MailChimp
Other companies who charge for duplicate email addresses: AWeber, GetResponse, iContact.
Therefore, John from our example is not counted as one subscriber but as three subscribers.
Now multiply John’s example for each one of your subscribers. You may find out that instead of 450 subscribers (just an example), you’re paying for 900, 1,350 or whatever subscribers count results from applying that policy. It may double the price you have to pay, or even worse.
Conclusions
Don’t even think about considering email list segmentation something bad. It isn’t. It’s a good email marketing technique. The negative side effect revealed in this blog post is created by the policies of some email marketing companies. But not every company has that policy in place ;-)
When you decide what autoresponder company to choose for your email marketing needs, don’t rely too much on reviews. Why? Read more MailChimp reviews and see how many of them include the piece of information mentioned in this article ;-)
As opposed to this example taken from AWeber’s site, the excerpt mentioned above isn’t taken from a pretty useless help article. The article is titled “How do MailChimp pricing plans work?” Irrespective of your email marketing experience, you’re supposed to read it. So… when you compare two or more email marketing services, don’t read only the Pricing pages. Check also the details. They may double the monthly fee you’re supposed to pay and change the result of your comparison the other way around ;-)
To your email marketing success!
Adrian Jock
P.S. Did you segment your mailing list? Is your autoresponder company charging you for the duplicate subscribers?
Wow! That’s sneaky – thanks for warning us to watch out for it.
To be honest segmentation is something I have still to “work up to”, but I appreciate the example you have given us about how helpful it can be to keeping subscribers happy.
Joy
Thank you for your comment, Joy.
List segmentation is a good thing not matter what type of mailing list you have.
Here’s yet another example: it is nice if you send on 4th of July a message to your US subscribers and maybe even give them a small gift. It shows that you care. But you may not want to send the same “Happy 4th of July” message to your UK readers. It doesn’t make sense, does it?
In order to be able to send such messages addressed only to some of your readers, you need to segment your list ;-)
In AWeber you also pay for the people that have unsubscribed from your list :D Something extra to checkout.
Hi Liudas,
Thank you for your comment. That’s right, but there’s no need for me to check it out. :)
If you follow the path:
Conclusions => 3rd grey bullet => link
then you’ll find out an article related to your comment. And there are more related articles on this blog ;)
Adrian, thanks for taking the time to aware us. May I also point out that segmenting the email list should yield a higher return on investment because the market demographic is targeted and the message well timed with current interests of the audience.
“Segment your email list” may roll of the tongue elegantly but the mechanics and analysis of segmenting is sometimes more like talking with marbles in your mouth
In other words, I tip my hat to the art of email marketing, because it’s not just about out rolling compelling content and attractive offers.
It’s also about creating “many” defined gateways of interest from which you create a niche list and influence people to “give up” some personal time to engage with you at a future date.
Adrian, let me take the time to just say thank you for your recent support on Twitter and sharing my content, I look forward to many meetings of the mind @exodusanalytics
Hi Robert,
Thank you for your comment. That’s right, the ultimate goal of list segmentation is getting a higher ROI. See you on Twitter :)
Hi Adrian,
Interesting fact! I’ve not really done much segmentation with my list, other than creating different lists altogether. I think segmentation is good if you have a large enough list to warrant it, e.g. 5000+ (maybe less depending on your workload, needs, etc).
I think segmentation is also going through a phase of being the must-have trend these days, in much the same way as A/B split testing. Sounds good but is it really worth it?
Hi Tom,
Thank you for your comment. The size of the list is an irrelevant factor. The segmentation has to be done not because it’s trendy, but because some messages may not be relevant to a certain part of your audience.
For example, if you send an offer that is valid only for US & Canada residents, it’s pretty stupid to send it to other countries residents. It’s irrelevant whether those subscribers from other countries are 10, 50 or 5000. You shouldn’t send that offer to them.
Or… more than 10 yrs ago – when I started to segment my lists – it was pretty stupid to send to the male subscribers a headline like “Is your husband cheating on you?” Time changed, and the headline may not be very inappropriate. You’ll still get a lot of unsubscribes…
Finally, one last example – a different one: if you’re a business and you’d like to reward your loyal buyers (irrespective of their number!), from time to time you may want to send them discounts. But you may not want to send the discounts to everyone in town (all subs). If your list is segmented buyers/non-buyers, you can do it.
I can show you lots of such examples. None of them is related to the size of the list. The segmentation is done in order to send more targeted messages.
As for the question whether it is really worth it… your question is similar to “Does it pay to send targeted messages?” It depends on a case by case basis.
For example, if someone doesn’t make any (or almost any) money out of email marketing, most probably the segmentation would be a waste of time.
Or another example, if someone sends only generic messages (not always the best choice), maybe again the segmentation would be a waste of time. Etc, etc, etc :)
Hi Adrian,
Thanks for responding with such an in depth response. You raise points that I hadn’t considered. I suppose it all depends on what your end goals are for how you set up segmentation to respond and give you the results you’re after. Cheers!
Hi Adrian. With Mailchimp, you can create segments so that you only have one list with tags to identify what people are interested in. No need for multiple lists.
Hi Brian. Something doesn’t match, maybe you can explain …
See the paragraph quoted from MailChimp site? They are talking about multiple lists. Are they talking about something their users don’t need? ;-) If a user doesn’t need multiple lists whatsoever, then why do they talk about multiple lists and emphasize the fact that they charge for the duplicates?
Are you trying to explain that MailChimp designed the tag feature for smart people but at the same time included the multiple lists possibility that does exactly the same thing (and therefore is useless) in order to charge the “not so smart” users more money?
That’s what you claimed, right? There are two features that do the same thing, but one of them generates additional costs to the user while the other one doesn’t. Are you sure that you didn’t miss something?
One company that does not charge for duplicate email addresses is a company called Drip. You can visit my blog for write ups on this subject.
I do appreciate your posts about Aweber charging since this company seems to be huge in the internet marketing niche and other similar niches.
Hi Jon. Thanks for stopping by.
From the costs perspective, it doesn’t automatically mean that a company that charges for duplicates will charge you more than a company that doesn’t charge for duplicates.
For example, compare GetResponse pricing and Drip pricing and you’ll see that even if GR charges for duplicates, in many cases the total monthly cost is lower for GR users.
Good point, Adrian. However, the lifeblood of most businesses online is email deliverability. I’ve found that my delivery rate using Drip is more than 4X of what GR was giving me. So if cheaper is the goal, then GR is the way to go. But if getting your message into the inbox is the goal, I believe Drip is the way to go along with all the added features you get with Drip, it’s the superior product.
1) I completely disagree with your conclusions regarding email deliverability. If you’re interested in finding out why I disagree, I invite you to read this article: https://www.adrianjock.com/email-marketing-services-deliverability/
2) Warning: Deliverability is not related in any way to the topic of this specific article or to my comment (“costs perspective”). Be so kind and stay on topic. You’re trying to lead this conversation (and that’s how you actually started) into a Drip promotion. That’s not acceptable. My article isn’t about Drip but about costs that sometimes may be incurred when a mailing list is segmented.