List Building Tips - List Segmentation

Everybody who builds a list talks about list segmentation. But what is it? What’s the most effective way to segment your lists? Is it something you should even be doing at all? These questions will be answered in this article. I think you will find this interesting reading.

Okay, let’s start off with what list segmentation is. That part’s easy. List segmentation is taking a big list (big being a relative term) and breaking it down into smaller lists. So let’s say you have a large list of about 100,000 people. After segmenting that list, you might end up with six or seven different lists of about 15,000 people, more or less. Some lists will obviously be bigger than others.

Why do we do this? Well, the easiest way to explain this is with an example. Let’s say you’re in the “make money online” niche, which by itself is a very large niche that covers lots of different topics. You have everything from PPC advertising to Video marketing. In fact, next to the health niche, I’d say that the make money online niche has more sub niches than just about any other niche.

Now, given this broad topic, you’re going to have people on your list who might be interested in different aspects of making money online. Some people may in fact just be interested in learning PPC or article marketing or whatever. What you want to do is put these people into a list that specializes in that one sub topic. But what’s the most effective way to do this?

In my opinion, the most effective way to do this is to take your general list, cover as many topics in that general list as you can, just not in great detail, and THEN…offer them low end products for the various sub niches such as PPC, article marketing and so on. Then, for the prospects who buy the low end products, give them the option of joining the list specifically made for that sub niche. When they join that list, remove them from the general list. Then, all your content and promotions for the smaller list will be specifically for that sub niche.

Now comes the $64,000 question. Should you be doing this? Well, the answer I’m going to give you is going to surprise you. It depends. If you don’t have enough content or a targeted enough product for that particular sub niche, then you probably don’t want to start a new list. What will you offer the person who’s on that list? If not much, you might end up losing them permanently whereas with the larger list, covering a number of different topics, you might have had a better chance of keeping them interested enough to stick around.

Ultimately, you have to look at your business model and see if it makes sense to actually run multiple lists given the amount of content and the product(s) you have to offer for that sub niche.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of not getting your emails delivered, read or opened? Sick of not making any sales from your email marketing efforts? Visit my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/emailmarketing/index.html and get your hands on 5 years of my personal experience with email marketing…experience that has earned me tens of thousands of dollars yearly.