How to Optimize Your Next Affiliate Email Marketing Campaign with Micro Segmentation written by Ongage
The first step in optimizing an affiliate email marketing campaign is to engage in agile email marketing. By engaging agile principles you will:
Anticipate your audience’s interests with relevant, dynamic content
- Automate opt-in forms and unsubscribe requests
- Use data to pinpoint content and iterate email campaigns
Read below for the basic principles and best practices for micro segmentation in affiliate email marketing and the easy third party integrations you can use to employ them.
Segmentation is a Starting Point
According to their recent article on segmentation, IBM found that segmented campaigns had “94.1 percent more click-through rates and 14.63 percent more opens than non-segmented campaigns.” Segmenting your audience by location, vocation, and interests is a no-brainer in today’s affiliate email marketing ecosystem. Most recipients are inundated with emails with subject lines like this:
- Katerina, Your Business Cards Need a Makeover
- 5 Entrepreneurship Tips for you, Deray
While personalization increases engagement and segmenting has measurable benefits over non-topically divided emails, the top affiliate email marketers are using micro segmentation to create dynamic, targeted content in emails that lead to increased clicks and conversions, and loyal email fans.
Advantages of Micro-Segmenting
Micro segmenting: layering segmented groups in a data-smart manner for optimization of available email marketing data to exponential ROI.
- Our recent interview with a super affiliate found that personalizing emails with dynamic content through micro segmentation cut his workday in half and quadrupled his monthly income
- The Data and Marketing Association found a 760% increase in email revenue from micro segmentation
- Email marketing consultant Jordie van Rijn found these staggering results in his article Getting Smart With Email Marketing Segmentation:
Targeted campaigns to groups with up to 150 customers had at least a $1.90 uplift per customer, while target groups of 1,500+ had an uplift of at most $0.50 (almost a 4:1 ratio).
The bottom line: micro segmenting in affiliate email marketing campaigns ROI has exponentially beneficial results for your bottom line.
The Best Micro Segmentation for your Campaigns
The more specific and relevant your content, the higher return on the investment of time and resources in sending an email.
Here are four main areas to focus on in micro segmentation, recommended by Jordie van Rijn:
- Geotargeting: Personalizing content based on location is a goldmine for affiliate email marketing with job search engines
- Demographics: Age, gender, and occupation can determine a lot in terms of what a person is generally interested in, but needs to be layered with other segmentation to avoid broadly mis-calculating your audience
- Psychographics: Values, attitudes, opinions
- Behavior: Intent, buyer stage, life cycle stage, engagement (past, recent, opens, clicks, and other post click engagement data, areas of particular interest based on engagement data)
- Cross Channel Marketing Data: from your website, social media, and other marketing channel data you might have on your clients that would determine the type of specific dynamic content they should receive
Each of these segments aids in targeting your audience, but just as a missile uses velocity and temperature to hit its target, micro segmenting your list will help you hit just the right people with your affiliate email marketing campaigns.
Dynamic Content
Dynamic content is one of the more powerful and efficient tools marketers can employ to target micro-segments with tailored specific content for each micro-segment.
For example, to target job-seekers, you might segment of all recipients who opened a job-offering campaign you sent them in the last week. That behavior (opening the previous message) may signal that they are actively looking for a job.
That segment of active job seekers can still include 100K or maybe even a million subscribers. This is where dynamic content saves the day.
With dynamic content, in the same campaign, you can serve tailored job listing content to a micro-segment of coders seeking programming jobs in San-Francisco, while another micro-segment of RNs seeking nursing jobs in Dallas gets a completely different set of job offerings in the very same campaign.
In the end, your campaign to 100K subscribers might end up targeting 10K micro-segments in the very same campaign some.
The highly dynamic level of serving up tailored content for each micro-segment will do wonders for streamlining your email marketing operations and resulting in tremendous lifts in performance.
3rd Party Content Integration
In a smart affiliate email marketing tool like Ongage, third party content integrations are simple to implement for all of the measureable results described above.
Job Boards and More
Ongage offers a variety of 3rd party content integration to easily serve up tailored content to micro-segments. From AdStation to many of the leading job-board feeds, to CreditAndLoan.com Mortgage Insurance XML Feed, Ongage offers easy setup and usage of highly dynamic content for micro-segmenting
About Ongage:
The cutting edge Ongage platform instantly transforms email marketing by offering multiple ESP and SMTP providers, improved deliverability and redundancy, and a variety of 3rd party integrations and plugins. The Ongage platform was designed to optimize email marketing performance and effectiveness, reduce sending-costs, automate email marketing tasks, and boost ROI. With Ongage, email marketers can easily switch between delivery vendors in order to ensure that each campaign meets their business needs and budge
