It’s simple – segmentation increases email marketing responsiveness. In a world where we’re inundated with thousands of marketing messages every day, relevancy is the key to catching your subscribers attention. If we can agree on that, then we can also agree that you need to start segmenting your email marketing.

So you ask, “where do I start?” That’s going to depend on your industry and how much data you have about your subscribers. A good place to begin for segmentation rookies is to examine the gender make up of your audience. How many of your subscribers are male and how many are female? Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, right? So why are you sending them the exact same content? Setting up a gender-based segmentation isn’t as hard as you might think. In fact, it’s really very simple.

If you've found yourself sending large attachments via email, you already understand how important it is to be able to deliver supplementary material safely and conveniently to your email audience.

Unfortunately, including attachments in your emails the traditional way has several drawbacks. If you are including larger files, the total size of your email will grow, causing it to take longer to deliver and potentially bogging down mail server traffic. Additionally, many readers may be hesitant to open particularly large emails, fearing that a large attachment might turn out to be spyware or a virus.

Conserving Email Bandwidth

Even sending just one large attachment (or many smaller ones) can pose a serious bandwidth problem, if you're sending email the old-fashioned way. Not only can your readers' in boxes be bogged down by downloading large files, but mail server networks can also suffer. If you're sending a message to 10,000 recipients and you're including a 3-megabyte file in the email, then that's potentially up to 30 gigabytes of bandwidth that mail servers have to chug through. This slows things down for everyone, especially because your readers may have urgent messages coming in that are being delayed by your unwieldy, attachment-heavy emails.

Relidy's Hosted Attachments get around this problem by including the attachments in your emails as simple links to files that are hosted on our servers. This not only cuts down on mail server bandwidth usage, but also saves your readers time, because your message downloads quickly. Once they've read your message, your readers can then decide for themselves when it's convenient to download the attachments that you've included.

Compared with social-media, email marketing is by far the less glamorous. But it depends on what you classify as glamorous... making sales and landing new customers is by far more sexy to most people than receiving "likes".

The boom in smart phones means consumers check email more often, especially at a time when data and web tracking are becoming much easier to use.

The numbers drive a compelling case for that -- email provided $39.40 in sales per dollar of advertising this year, followed by $22.38 through Web search, $19.71 from Internet display ads and $12.90 from social networks, according to the Direct Marketing Association.