We’ve recently been designing new ways to segment and target our email marketing lists, and a recent blog posting from The Direct Marketing Blog entitled Email marketing lists: Think small, get focused sums it all up for us:
A new email marketing study from ExactTarget (free online registration required) finds that smaller lists enjoy the highest open and click-through rates. The study also reinforces earlier findings that Friday is the best day for email opens (and a pretty good day for click-throughs, as well).
The analysis covers 2005 data from 4,000 organizations with 230,000 sends and 2.7 billion email messages. It found that B2B lists, more than half of them small lists with fewer than 1,000 subscribers, get a higher response than their larger business-to-consumer counterparts. The study goes on to suggest that B2C companies consider segmenting their supersized lists (more than 40 percent have more than 10,000 subscribers) into smaller groups to boost response rates.
Of course, this makes perfect sense. Carving small, focused lists from a larger list makes it possible for marketers to craft messages and offers that closely target the interests of particular audiences — thus increasing the response rate.