So, why is contact management and segmentation important to an awesome email marketing strategy?

Try to imagine sending an email off to your contacts without a place that centrally stores and collects information on them. Talk about aggravating and a time waster and by the end of it all, you still would not be able to send your contextual messages to your contacts.

All of the contacts in your database are the core of your customer, marketing, and sales strategies. These are real people so, you must provide real value to them because they are the ones that grow your business.

In order to provide real value, you will need to know all you can about your contacts plus understand THEIR needs.

You will also want, no need, a strategy set into place allowing you to be as productive as possible. Yes, this is where your contact management and segmentation will come into play.

Two Aspects of Creating an Awesome Email Marketing Strategy:

1. Contact Management
2. Segmentation

Contact Management

First off, what exactly is contact management?

It’s a strategy that uses a software program (autoresponder) to store and source your contacts information, such as email information, their name, contact history, etc..

Think about just coming home from the grocery store and having no place to put your food. No cabinets or refrigerator to put your food in. Everything would be unorganized and go bad if it needed to be refrigerated and was not.

Your contact database is where you keep track of the people and companies that have a relationship with your business and you will use this database to create your contact management strategy.

Use your contact management strategy and Database to:

• The ability to see the big picture of all your contacts
• Keep a healthy database by organizing your contacts
• Integrate with all your tools using your contacts information (via your database)

All the really important information, that is the gas that fuels your business, is all contained in/on your database.

Segmentation

All of that brings us to the foundations of your segmentation.

Inbound marketing is all about the happy union between context and content.

Remember your contacts are real people and to treat them as such.

You are able to do this by bringing your context and content together that you send them.

Taking your contacts and dividing them into smaller similar groups will allow you to create a message, more relevant, and engaging to those contacts that are receiving your emails.

Take this for example:

You just put on a webinar or event of some kind. You can create a segment based on those that attended and of those that did not attend. You can send some contextual information about what the webinar/event was on to those that attended and some contextual information to those that did not attend, an invitation to attended your next webinar/event.

But there is something else you need to do, to have awesome emails for your contacts in/on your database, plus add your contextual messages for your segments, make sure to have a CLEAN DATABASE!

22.5% of your database of contacts will just naturally break down, become useless each year on average.

So, in order to service/cater to the interest and needs of your contacts. You MUST HAVE the right people in/on your database to start with.

The reason your database is so valuable is that it contains all the information which allows each and every interaction to build on each other.

As you have people added to your database, it is at the basics of level, but there some reasons to delete some of those contacts.

Couple of Reasons to Delete a Contact:

• Ineligible Contact
• Spam Submissions

It’s really important to consider what your future potential interaction is with a contact before you delete them from your database.

Maintaining a healthy and up-to-date database should be one of your number one priorities. You are doing this to help you create awesomely powerful and contextual conversations.

Conclusion

This will ensure that your contact database is the foundation for every email sent.

When your contact management strategy and you use that information to create segments for your contacts. You are creating awesome emails people engage with and love.

By doing this you will see the power of contact management and segmentation working together.