E-Mail Marketing: Segmentation Screw-Ups
By Hannah McNamara • Jan 9th, 2009 • Category: Internet MarketingThe ability to segment your marketing lists and send personalised, highly relevant messages is a key benefit of collecting and maintaining customer records.
That is…until it goes wrong.
A recent post on the Aweber blog (Segmentation Screwups: How do you recover?) shows what can happen when an email intended for a select group of customers gets broadcast to the entire customer database. It shows how Borders potentially missed an opportunity to build their relationship with existing customers and drive traffic into ALL of their stores - not just the one they originally meant to promote.
There’s a lesson for all of us in this!
I know I’ve sent out Marketing messages which weren’t exactly perfect - putting the wrong phone number on an ad in the daily national newspapers isn’t something I was particularly proud of! But it certainly made me look at things a lot more carefully before signing them off from that point on. Do you have any horror stories or things you want to confess to? We won’t tell anyone - honest! 
Hannah McNamara is a career coach with well over 15 years experience in Sales & Marketing and is a Chartered Marketer. She has worked both in agencies and client-side, and by the age of 26 was reporting directly to the Chief Executive of a national retail chain. In 2004 she retrained as a professional career coach and set up her business HRM Coaching Ltd in London, UK to help ambitious professionals climb the corporate ladder - for more information and free career boosting resources go to www.hrmcoaching.com
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