But, if you’re still only using email blasts to your whole list, you’re missing out on an opportunity. You can increase your sales even more by taking time to target your audience with a technique called segmenting. Segmenting breaks your list into special groups of customers who you can email separately with hyper-relevant content. Some businesses have seen huge spikes in sales by targeting their customers this way.

Here are three ways you can target your existing customers for a richer email campaign.

Targeting By Location

If you have both a physical store location and make online sales, you’ll want to section out your local customers for special in-store promotions. You don’t want to send a coupon for store-use-only to a customer who lives thousands of miles away and only buys from you online.

Most email service providers log the IP addresses of where people sign up to your list. Those IP addresses are based on location; so, when you specify a geographic location to send your email to, only people with related IP addresses should be included.

Targeting By Interests

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Netflix telling me that they added a new season of one of my favorite TV shows to their streaming library. It was exciting to open my inbox and see such a well-targeted message about something I’d been waiting to watch for months now.

Netflix targeted their email to me based on my activity on their site — television series I’d watched and rated highly. They’ve sent me a few of these emails to announce new content, and I’ve opened every one as they’re so relevant to what I’m interested in.

You can do this with your own customers, too, to increase the relevance of your own campaign:

• Ask for special preferences on your signup form. Start with favorite kinds of products, gender, or how often they prefer emails from you.
• Track what customers buy from you or the links they click on in your emails. If you integrate your email campaign with an online shopping cart service, you can add customers to a specific list based on what they buy. Then recommend similar products they’d enjoy based on their purchase history.
• You can segment after signup, too. Send short surveys in your newsletters and segment subscribers based on their answers. You’ll have the added benefit of making your emails fun and interactive, too.

Target Inactive Customers

Sometimes your readers stop being responsive to your messages. Sometimes it’s because their lives get too busy. But sometimes, it’s because they’re less interested in your campaign than they were when they first signed up. Targeting these inactive subscribers can help you separate the too busy from the uninterested, giving you a more profitable list.

The Indianapolis Symphony took this approach when their ticket sales started declining. They sent a targeted offer to email subscribers who hadn’t opened their messages for a while, presenting them with a free ticket for opting into a new and improved newsletter. They removed everyone from their list who didn’t bother opening the email.

The Indianapolis Symphony lost over 95% of their subscribers. It sounds terrible. But here’s the cool part: their ticket sales actually doubled with the smaller but more highly-targeted list.

If you’re not reaching the sales goals you hoped for, targeting your inactive subscribers can give your campaign a similar lift by leaving you with a list of highly-interested, highly-engaged customers.

Targeting your emails makes them more relevant and interesting to the customers you’re trying to reach. And interested customers means more profitable relationships for your business.

Because email feels so personal, your messages need to connect with the people you’re talking to. You need to keep each individual engaged with your message so that your email can sell.

Here are four ways to draw a person into conversation in the inbox.

1. Draw Them In With Killer Headlines

The subject line is your conversation starter. It’s your first impression in the inbox and helps your reader make up his mind whether your email is worth reading or not.

There are plenty of ways to craft a killer subject line that draws your reader in. Ask a question, or tease your message content with a clever play on words. Just make sure that it’s related to your message content — you don’t want your readers to regret opening the message, because they won’t forget it.

2. Tell A Story

People relate to stories better than they relate to a straight-up sales pitch. Stories are entertaining and they give you and your business a relatable personality.

One of the most effective stories you can tell is about your problems — the problems that prompted you to start your business or launch your product. Your reader can likely relate to these frustrations himself, and that establishes the clear need for your services or the niche you designed your product to fill.

A well-crafted story that relates to your reader’s common pains and problems can be more effective than any sales pitch.

3. Get Personal

Getting personal goes hand-in-hand with storytelling. People prefer buying from other people, rather than from impersonal brands.

So go ahead and talk about yourself to build rapport with your audience. Use an automated follow up series to introduce yourself and the people who work with you. That allows your reader to feel like he knows the people behind the brand name.

Email is a one-on-one conversation, and making it more personal makes it feel more natural.

4. Give A Clear Call To Action

After opening and reading your message, your reader needs to do something with it. What do you want them to do? That’s your call to action.

An effective call to action should be clear but not demand too much from your reader. Asking someone to “Buy now!” might be too abrasive and turn him off from making a purchase.

Instead, build from the relationship established in your email. Make the next step simple: a call to “Find out more” or “Read the benefits” is usually more appealing than a demand to buy when they may not be ready yet. Calls to interact with you on social networks or give feedback on your service can get a good response, too.

Your email message is a conversation. And conversations can sell!

It doesn’t matter how many best practices your message follows; if your subject line flops, your subscribers won’t even bother with the rest of your message.

Here are three steps — plus a bonus insight — to improve your subject lines and get the right kind of attention from your readers.

Step 1: Get Into Your Customers’ Mindset

You might be tempted to turn every element of your message into an opportunity to sell. But an effective subject line doesn’t try to make a sale. The job of an effective subject line is to get your reader to open your message.

This means you need to think like your customers. You’re asking for a time commitment from them — however small — to stop and read your email. So what’s in it for them? What kind of value will your subscriber get in exchange for opening your message? This is what your subject line should answer. A good subject line doesn’t sell, it entices.

Step 2: Use Snippets

Some email clients, like Gmail, display the first few lines of text in your email beside the subject line as a preview. This is called a snippet, and it’s usually populated by information in your preheader.

But like the example above, many businesses don’t take advantage of the snippet’s full potential. The snippet can act as an extension of your subject line, showing more of the value in store for subscribers who open.

David’s Bridal has the right idea. Without even opening the email, I know the information inside is going to save me time and stress. That’s the kind of email I want to take the time to open and read!

Step 3: Don’t Over-Stress About Spam Filters

You’ve probably heard that you should never use the word “free” in your subject line. Plenty of email marketers stress about accidentally triggering spam filters based on certain keywords in their subjects.

While content filtering is a serious concern, you don’t need to consciously avoid these words. Late last year Yahoo! released a Mail Visualization tool that shows popular keywords in subject lines that get delivered and blocked for spam. “Free” showed up in both. It’s less about the specific words you use and more about how you use them.

Instead of worrying about trigger words, make sure that your subject line accurately reflects your message content. Spam filters will zap a misleading subject line regardless of the keywords it contains.

Bonus Step: Test And Experiment

Here’s your bonus step: Always test and experiment with your subject lines to find what’s most effective for your audience.

You might think that a subject written in all capitals looks obnoxious, but one small business ran a test with surprising results: the all-caps version of one subject line they tested got 18% more opens than their normal subject line. You might find a surprise or two like this yourself. But you won’t know until you test to find the formula that works for you.