One-to-one marketing: Dream or wasted effort?

Better informed marketing campaigns can be watershed events for many businesses, but keep it simple and stick to modest goals if you want to see them through.

Too often email marketers try to go from one end of the segmentation spectrum (blast away) to the other end (micro-segmentation). This extreme swing often bogs them down and, even if they are able to pull it off, often doesn't yield better results than a simple, macro segmentation approach. After all, most marketing teams are stretched thin and stressed out in today's crazy economy.

In my new byline in iMedia Connection, I offer a sane approach to segmentation that revolves around:

• Understanding the true barriers to implementing your marketing strategy and choose the strategies with the best benefit-to-barrier ratios.
  
  
• Pursuing strategies that use objective data for all of your customers rather than subjective (self-reported) or incomplete information.
  
  
• Implementing the strategy in a graduated approach (simple to complex, broader to narrower, general to specific).