We know how important segmentation is in allowing you to target your subscribers with the most relevant content. So in the last few months we’ve been doing a lot of work on our segments feature, including releasing our new segments builder and extending the way rules could be created.

We’re now excited to unveil one of our most popular feature-requests – segments in autoresponders. You can now use what you know about your subscribers to send them more relevant autoresponder emails and combine the power of the most relevant message with sending it at the best time.

Here are a few ways you might want to use segments in autoresponders:

Personalized welcome emails

Say you run an online clothing store and capture whether someone is male or female when they sign up. Now you can use that information to send gendered versions of your welcome email and make your communications highly targeted from the very beginning.

Targeted birthday emails

If you’re sending birthday emails to customers using the anniversary of a date autoresponder option, you could apply segments to make the campaign even more relevant. For example, you could identify VIP customers based on how much they’ve spent with you over the past year, and then target the VIP customer segment with an extra special birthday gift.

Subscription renewal series

Or finally, say you sell annual virus protection software subscriptions. Using the exact match of a date autoresponder option you could set up a series that sends a renewal notification out 30 days before the subscription expiration date. You can then use information on whether someone has paid or not paid, to target those who have not renewed at the 15 day mark and then again at the 7 day mark. Each email in the series would only be sent to those who fell into the segment ‘have not paid’, which would automatically refresh each time updated payment information was uploaded.

We know a lot of you were have been looking to see this feature so we’re really excited to share it with you. We look forward to seeing how you use it to improve how you communicate with subscribers and ultimately drive better results from your email marketing.

Often there are good reasons to exclude subscribers from a campaign. For example, you may want to send an email update that’s only relevant to people who haven’t registered for a specific event. Or alternately, you may want to avoid sending your monthly newsletter to people who are already on your weekly mailing list. Well, it’s now possible to exclude lists and segments with a single click – here’s a quick look at what you’ll see when you next send a campaign.

As with much of the app, we’ve really aimed at making the exclusion of lists and segments as simple and self-explanatory as possible. When creating a new campaign in your eConnect Email account, you’ll now see an “Exclude list” or “Exclude segment” button when you hover over either a list or segment on the “Who will receive this campaign” screen. Clicking this button will ensure that subscribers in the list or segment are not only removed, but excluded, or “washed” (as it’s sometimes called) from other lists that have been included in the send.

What’s also worth mentioning is that excluded lists and segments are subtracted from the unique subscriber count in our updated Campaign Snapshot.

This has been an actively requested addition to the app, so we really hope that you find it to be helpful when sending targeted campaigns. Just to give you an insider tip, we’re going to be unveiling a few updates to how you manage your lists in the weeks ahead, so stay tuned by subscribing to our blog updates below, or at least checking back often. In the interim, if you have any questions or feedback, either let us know in the comments below, or get in touch directly – naturally, we’d love to hear from you.