We’ve talked before about the perils of personalization and imagining that adding a variable name or industry field to an email is going to convince audiences that you know them. The solution is always the same: Give people what they want when they want it. And the best way to do that is to segment your list.

Once you get things set up (not easy, but doable), segmenting your email audiences means:

1. You can avoid sending irrelevant, unsubscribe-inducing blasts to everyone you know. And:
2. Your targets will come to recognize you as a high-value content provider.

That can lead to higher open rates, more clicks and fewer unsubscribes (or worse, messages reported as spam).

Even the simplest segmentation allows you to zero in on what the recipient needs, rather than making vague statements that could sort of, maybe, hopefully apply to anyone.

So how do you divide up your audience? Look at who they are. For our diabetes care client, we’ve segmented by people who have type 1 and type 2 diabetes as well as sending different messages to parents of kids who have been diagnosed. While these audiences may each be living with the same condition, their treatments, needs and mindsets vary pretty widely. For tech clients, we know that the people using software may not be the same ones making the purchase, so we lay out the benefits differently to each.

For B2B audiences, we break apart:

• Clients, prospects and partners
• Decision makers vs decision influencers, often by title
• Career stages
• Specific pain points or interests
• Where people are in the sales funnel, based on how they’ve interacted with our site and past messaging
• Past or potential purchase value—big opportunities may get personal messages or have email touches supplemented by (gasp!) a phone call

Consider segmenting by geography, gender (if it’s relevant to your offering), purchase history, industry, you name it. And don’t just think in terms of text. Segmenting by industry or gender can often be handled more deftly by trading out an image.

Even the simplest segmentation allows you to zero in on what the recipient needs, rather than making vague statements that could sort of, maybe, hopefully apply to anyone.

Of course, you have to have data about the people on your list before you begin to segment them. Some of this you can enter into your email or CRM platform yourself—you can tag clients and prospects—and some can be inferred from analytics. However, for some data, you may need to ask. Tread cautiously here, as this can lead to lengthy, off-putting forms or creating segments that don’t really matter to the reader. If you really need detailed information, you may want to gather it through a survey or contest, rather than a newsletter signup or general contact form, so you don’t scare off leads before you have them.

Five-year-old data from MailChimp (that everyone is still quoting, so we will, too), suggests that segmentation can drop unsubscribes by nearly 10% and double your click-throughs. Even if the numbers have shifted a bit, it’s no surprise. In a crowded inbox or noisy news day, relevance wins.