2011 has come and gone and it’s time to take a look at your mailing lists and give them a refresh for 2012. Mailing lists perform differently over time; some addresses become invalid, some recipients change their email habits and some continue to be engaged in your emails.

Using our segmentation tool allows you to easily find out what’s going on with your recipients and create lists based on engagement. Ok, now you’re probably thinking “I’m a busy, small business owner, I don’t think I have time to do this!”

There are a few compelling reasons to invest a little time in your lists: To help get your email to the inbox, you want to make sure your lists are clean and you understand how they perform. And, once your lists are set up, you can send out emails to target your recipients in different ways. Targeting parts of your list with information that they’re interested in can increase engagement and help your business or organization grow.

For example, if you’re a winery, you can set up your lists based on your customers’ favorite wine varietal (i.e., Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Merlot, etc.). This works for any business type and non-profits too; sort your lists by active donors, volunteers, or event participants.

Why should you do this? Your recipients will appreciate having an email sent to them that is tailored to their interests, and they’ll be more apt to open the email and click on links. After you’ve sent out a few emails, take a look at your reporting to find out who’s opening your emails consistently and/or clicking on links. You can use the segmentation tool to create lists of recipients who have opened your email and/or clicked on links. These will be your engaged recipients; the people who are eager to read your email when you send it out. You can send special offers, sneak peek information on sales, new products or services, and even mail to them more frequently.

Here are some quick steps to get you started segmenting your lists, but there is more info on our How to Do Everything site.

First, segment by Campaign recipients.

Then select the campaign or campaigns you want to use for the list.

Now you can make some choices based on what information you want. You can select just openers, clickers or both. Remember, if you select only openers you could be missing those who read the text version and click on links. And if you select both, your list will be smaller, but very targeted.

A little extra effort for a small business yes, but spending a bit of time on your list now can bring great results for your business the rest of the year.

© 2012, Contributing Author. All rights reserved.