I received this email from American Airlines the other day as I do on a regular basis and something always irks me about these emails.

Now, I live in Jacksonville Florida. So, I would naturally expect to see a subject titled “American Airlines Net SAAver Fares” have some content which would be relevant to me. Keep in mind, I have flown with American Airlines before, from Jacksonville and my profile is updated with correct city/state/zip.

Take a look below…Do you see any flights out of Jacksonvi

lle? Are there any flights to Jacksonville which i might be able to forward to a friend? No…nothing. Why would American Airlines fill my inbox with something which is completely irrelevant? An industry such as air travel would surely benefit from targeting their emails based on their customers location.

I know Jacksonville is not a big airport, but I would settle for getting a couple emails a year vs. getting one a month if it had content which was relevant to me.  The age old battle of Frequency vs. Relevancy.  I think Frequency is winning in this case but I would be interested to see what the metrics are for such an email.  Has American Airlines ever tested email targeting and segmentation?

If you are an email marketing in an industry where segmenation data can be easily collected, make sure you are using the data in an efficient manner.  Sending irrelevant emails will increase costs (if using an third party), decrease opens and subsequent clicks, and will likely shrink your email list size faster than you are able to build it.

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?