This article was originally written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. You can read the original post here.

If you are currently managing email marketing efforts for your organization, you are undoubtedly engaging in email segmentation in some way. You might also be engaging in personalization. Yet there's some confusion around the distinction between segmentation and personalization. A good way to think of this is: Segmentation is a method of working with customer data that benefits the marketer, while personalization is all about benefiting the customer.

For instance, email segmentation allows marketers to break up a large customer list into groups with the same general interests. This could be interest in a specific product category, those located in a specific geography, or those that took a specific action in the past. Put differently, you can look at segmentation by behavioral, demographic, geographic or psychographic methods. Grouping in this manner helps marketers reach people who have a high likelihood of responding to a particular message or offer.

Personalization, on the other hand, takes segmentation much further by drilling down on specific behaviors and actions of an individual to provide them with the necessary information to move to the next step in their buyer’s journey. Thus, personalization benefits customers by giving them a specific offer, opportunity or piece of information based on their specific behavior or needs. In this article, I’m going to discuss when and how to use both email segmentation and personalization to get the most out of each approach.

This article was originally written by Greg Kihlström for CMSWire. You can read the original post here.