• by Jordie van Rijn , October 3, 2014

What will email marketers be doing next to evolve their email programs?

According to the 2014 Forrester Wave Email Marketing Vendors report, the strategies that attract the most interest are those not yet in use by enterprise e-mail senders, but on their wish list:

1.     Micro-segmentation and targeting (66%)

2.     Personalization based on time of opening (61%)

3.     In-email transactions (58%)

4.     Video (43%)

Micro-segmentation

Segmentation has been one of the top-ten desired strategies for years, but it is now being taken a step further. In micro-segmentation the segments are very refined, usually combining several segmentation criteria. Unlocking more and more and more data from website tracking or linking to other channels from the ESP, is an interesting movement and a prerequisite for micro-segmentation.

Micro-segmentation does not imply per se that the resulting groups are very small. Due to the scale of email lists, the resulting groups are large enough to obtain a nice return on email investment.

Because the technology is now available to make segmentation easier to use, and even automatically segment, it is also within practical reach of more senders.

Large brands deal with data integration in different ways. The availability of new APIs  and the choice of a central all-in-one solution will surely play a large role in the future applications of micro-segmentation.