Wow…so it’s been a little while since I’ve added a post. What can I say…work has been hectic.

It is known that if you target your email, you are increasing the relevancy of each interaction with your customers. The question becomes “At what cost?”. Is there some benefit to sending someone a dog email who has stated or purchased only cat products? Okay, that one may be obvious, but what do you do in the case of apparel. For example, would you send an email promoting bikinis to someone who has only purchased jeans in hopes of converting them. If you are only creating one email and do not plan on segmenting your list, is it better to not send the bikini email to a customer who purchased only jeans?

If we specifically ask customers to give us their preference, do we only make them mad by sending them something else in hopes of converting them to purchase a product which they initially have no interest in?

Or, do we rely on our analytics tools and purchase history and target our customers based on this data. This allows us to be pro-active in anticipating the behavior of our customers without asking the customer to provide one bit of data. Is this then not an added bonus for a customer when they realize they received an email for a pair of shoes that are on sale which just happen to match the top they purchased last week?

This is a constant struggle we as email marketers are faced with. We see the data…we run the tests. But how do we know for sure. How are you segmenting your data?