Half of E-mail Marketers Segment by Clicks: Forrester

The good news is 51% of e-mail marketers in a recent survey by Forrester Research said they use click-through data as a segmentation attribute.

The bad news is 51% of e-mail marketers in a recent survey by Forrester Research said they use click-through data as a segmentation attribute.

It’s good news because the number’s the highest it’s ever been, according to Forrester. For years, the number hovered between and quarter and a third of e-mail marketers surveyed, then in 2008 it jumped to 40%, according to the Forrester report authored by its lead e-mail analyst David Daniels.

So apparently the segment-by-clicks movement is gaining steam. However, with just over half of the 104 commercial e-mailers surveyed implementing this most basic technique, the marketplace clearly has a long way to go.

For one thing, competition for people’s attention in their inboxes is growing at a ferocious pace. The percentage of marketers in Forrester’s survey who reported sending 3 million e-mails or more per month has grown from 20% in 2008 to 25% in 2009, the researcher reported.

Moreover, marketers who blast the same messages out to their entire files are most certainly repeatedly hitting dormant accounts—one measure inbox provider use to determine whether or not the mailer is a spammer—and risking delivery troubles.

Also, according to Forrester, many e-mail marketing program managers are rewarded for the wrong things, such as list growth, which promotes retaining inactive names.

“A large number of e-mail marketers continue to knock on e-mail inbox doors without understanding if the pulse of subscriber engagement is still beating,” said the report. “Using click-through behavior as a segmentation attribute is necessary for e-mail marketers to not only measure the engagement of their list, but also drive different mailings that cater to the behavior of the subscribers.”

In other findings, according to Forrester, 51% of the e-mail marketers surveyed said they segment their e-mail messaging using demographics, 48% said they do so by open rates, 47% cited doing so using geographic data, 39% said they segment by recency and frequency of purchase, 30% said they segment by customer spending, 29% said they do so by customer profitability, 28% said they segment by source code and 24% said they do so using clickstream data.