An article published December 3rd by eMarketer noted some of the common challenges publishers are facing with their email marketing efforts.

US publishing professionals’ responses indicated that they were facing challenges with simple email marketing tactics including list growth and list maintenance. List growth was the most common hurdle, cited by the majority of respondents, while 41% had problems maintaining the lists they did have.

Regardless of your industry, there are some basic common-sense things you should be doing from the ground up to ensure you’re building up a winning email marketing list and email marketing capability.

1) Optimize your profile for segmentation.

An email list is only as good as your ability to segment and target to your customers. Most email opt-in forms will only ask for an email, and maybe a name. This means you’ll need to think strategically about ways to invite your customers back to provide more details about who they are and what are their interests. These are the building blocks of a targeting or segmentation strategy.

Think about your products or services and what might be key insights about your customers that could help you sell more.

2) Keep It Simple

While you want to build up your customer profile, don’t overdo it. For every field you ad to your profile, the higher the barrier for your consumers. So, keep it simple, and keep it lean. If you don’t need it, don’t ask for it.

3) Automate and Target Your Opt-In Flow

If you offer multiple products, consider how and where you are asking your customers for their email. I’m talking about being strategic about your email opt-in form placement. Many companies frequently place their email opt-in form or call-t0o-action right on the home page. While this is a high traffic page, if you’re targeting and marketing to multiple segments or selling multiple products, your home page opt-ins will be “unsegmented” unless you have a way to pass through a qualifying value.

Consider creating a landing page for your various products or segments (by interest, demographic, segment, etc) and placing email opt-in form and CTA on those pages. These opt-ins can include a segmentation value, which you would then not have to ask your customers for.

Your Turn

So, what else are you doing to better segment your customer data? How do you increase the value of your email list? Leave a comment.