As email marketing is constantly evolving, bigger is not necessarily better. You can have a list 5 million strong, but if you’re simply hitting send with the same message to everyone, you’re just wasting time and money. Sure, there are some instances where you have a message that is strong enough to send to your entire database, but this isn’t always the case.

Having a large list to communicate with your audience is a good thing. But knowing who is in that list is even more important. It’s about getting beyond the normal demographics such as age, location and gender. Your creative team can write and design a great email, but if it’s not getting to the right audience, then it’s not a great message.

Segmenting your database into smaller lists helps cut out the clutter and gets you to those who really want to interact with your message. With today’s technology, segmenting your email list is easier than ever. You just have to figure out what it is you’re looking for. The goal of this process is to improve your knowledge or your database.

Do you have a segment comprised of those who opened your email versus those who haven’t? You should. What about a segment of those who clicked on a link in your email? You should. Starting with these very basic segments, you can begin to drill down and understand that each person is unique from the millions of others in your database.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Once you have this basic data recorded, continue segmenting the list based on your actionable data as you continue to send your email messages. As more data comes in and more segments are defined, be sure to create different messages for these unique segments and watch your open rates and click rates climb.

One simple way to further define your list is by sending an easy survey email. Knowing what you want to find out about your list will determine what the survey is about. You can ask about email preferences, their thoughts on a particular issue or product, or anything else that will get your list to where you need it. Asking your audience what types of messaging they want to receive – and listening to their responses – goes a long way to achieving your goals.

Understanding your audience and their email tendencies is essential to delivering the right message every time. Yes, it takes time to figure out where everyone fits in to your database and yes, that database will be perpetually evolving. There will be many failures along the way as you continue to test and re-test using different messages to different segments, but this extra effort now will only help later.