In 1973, Ogilvy & Mather, a world-renowned advertising and marketing company who still trade today, ran a full-page ad summarising what they’d learned from half a billion coupons. Buried in that dense column text, alongside a present value economic formula and advice on how to make long copy succeed, was this: “Segmentation concentrates your dollars where they will do most good.”
That line was written about direct mail. It describes email segmentation for small businesses better than most things written in the last decade.
The tools to apply it are now free, or close to it. The thinking behind it hasn’t changed in fifty years. What’s changed is everything mechanical around it, and understanding what did and didn’t change is the most useful frame for getting email marketing right as an SME.
Contents
- What Ogilvy was actually talking about
- What has changed
- What hasn’t changed
- The 4 segments every SME email list should have
- The close is crucial
- TL;DR
What Ogilvy was actually talking about
The direct mail world of the 1970s operated on physical lists, compiled by hand or bought from brokers. Ogilvy’s team would match the demographic profile of their best existing customers, rent a similar list of households, and post them a carefully crafted letter. The tracking mechanism was a clipped coupon. A fast response cycle was measured in weeks.
Segmentation in that context meant something specific: don’t send the diesel engine letter to someone who drives a petrol car. Don’t send the garden catalogue to someone in a high-rise flat. Concentrate your postage and print budget on the people most likely to respond. The logic was ruthlessly economic. Every mailing had a real, measurable cost per piece.
Their ad copy had to be brutally efficient too: “glittering generalities turn readers off.” This was Ogilvy’s phrase for copy that sounds impressive but commits to nothing. His research showed that specific, concrete claims consistently outperformed vague brand language. That finding wasn’t intuitive to advertisers at the time. It still isn’t, judging by most B2B email.
The mechanics of direct mail were crude and the turnaround glacial by any modern standard. But the underlying thinking was more sophisticated than a lot of what passes for email strategy today.
What has changed
Almost everything mechanical has changed.
Your email platform knows within seconds whether someone opened a message. It can tell you which link they clicked, on which device, at what time of day. A/B tests that would have taken Ogilvy’s team months to read through coupon redemption data can be run, analysed, and acted on in 48 hours. The marginal cost of sending to one more person is effectively zero.
Mailchimp, Brevo, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo and most other platforms let you split your list by tag, purchase history, engagement level, or any custom field you care to track. Many CRMs manage the same segmentation for your sales pipeline. The infrastructure for sophisticated email segmentation is already paid for by your monthly subscription.
Personalisation at scale is now achievable for a one-person business. That was simply not true in 1973, when you needed a team, a print shop, and a budget for postage. The democratisation of these tools is one of the more significant shifts in business marketing of the last thirty years.
Most small businesses don’t use them.
What hasn’t changed
The principle underneath all of it remains exactly what Ogilvy described.
Sending the same message to everyone on your list is wasteful. It annoys the people who already bought from you. It confuses the people who have never heard of your product. It does nothing for the people who were interested once but went cold. Spray-and-pray email is the digital equivalent of mailing a garden catalogue to a high-rise flat.
Glittering generalities still turn readers off. Vague, generic marketing copy performs worst with the people you most want to reach. They’ve seen enough of it to dismiss it on sight, often within two seconds of reading the subject line. The more messages people receive, the faster their filter operates.
Segmentation fixes both problems at once. When you know who you’re writing to, you can write something specific enough to be worth reading. And when your messages are worth reading, your deliverability improves alongside your results.
The 4 segments every SME email list should have
Most small business email lists are unsegmented: everyone gets the same message on the same day. The following framework works for most B2B and B2C lists as a starting point. You don’t need sophisticated automation to implement it. Most email platforms can filter by these criteria within their standard list tools.
Building your core email segments
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Active buyers (last 90 days)
People who have purchased recently and are still within the warm window. These contacts don't need convincing. Use this segment for upsell sequences, referral asks, and loyalty offers. The message can be direct because trust is already established. A referral ask sent to a recent buyer often outperforms any acquisition campaign.
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Engaged non-buyers (opens or clicks, no purchase)
They're reading your emails but haven't converted. These contacts need a different kind of close: lower pressure, more specific. Look at what they clicked last and use that as your hook. A trial offer, a specific use-case email, or a direct question about what's holding them back often works well here. This is your highest-potential segment after active buyers.
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Dormant contacts (no engagement in 90+ days)
Contacts who have stopped opening or clicking. Sending to this segment damages your sender reputation over time as your overall engagement rate drops. Run a single re-engagement campaign: one honest message asking whether they want to stay on your list. If they don't respond, remove them. A smaller, engaged list outperforms a large, disengaged one in every metric that matters.
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New subscribers (last 30 days)
These contacts just joined and are forming their first impression of how you communicate. An onboarding sequence, not a sales push, is the right move. Set expectations: how often you'll email, what they'll get, what they can do next. First impressions set the engagement pattern. Contacts who don't open the first two or three emails rarely become active later.
This is a starting framework, not an exhaustive taxonomy. As you gather more data you can add segments based on purchase category, company size, or geography. But even this four-way split will outperform a single unsegmented list almost immediately, because each group is now receiving a message that reflects where they actually are.
If you’re dealing with an unvalidated or inherited list rather than one you built from scratch, the dormant segment becomes more complex. Our guide on what to do when you’ve inherited an email list covers the re-permission and GDPR angles in detail.
The close is crucial
This was another of Ogilvy’s direct response principles, and it translates exactly. The close is the moment you ask the reader to do something. In direct mail, it was the coupon. In email, it’s your call to action.
Every segment in your list needs a different close. Active buyers don’t need convincing. Ask them for a referral, a review, or an upgrade. Engaged non-buyers who’ve been reading your emails for months but never converted need a lower-pressure invitation: a trial, a call, or a specific offer tied to what they clicked last time. Dormant contacts need one honest message: “We haven’t heard from you. Do you want to stay on this list?” The close for that segment is a re-engagement link, not a sales pitch.
Generic “click here” or “find out more” is the digital equivalent of a poorly designed coupon. It gets weaker every year for the same reason it always underperformed: the reader has to supply all the meaning themselves. When you know your segment, you can write the specific close that fits where they actually are.
The right CRM makes this easier, because it holds the history you need to write a relevant close. If you’re currently choosing between platforms, our guide to choosing a CRM covers what to look for in terms of email integration and contact segmentation.
The investment in email segmentation isn’t primarily about the tools. It’s about changing how you think about your list: not as an audience, but as several different groups of people at different points in a relationship with your business, each of whom deserves a message written for them.
Ogilvy figured that out in 1973, working with physical coupons and a wait time measured in weeks. The infrastructure has changed completely. The principle hasn’t moved at all.
TL;DR
- Ogilvy’s 1973 direct response principles included a line that still defines good email marketing: “Segmentation concentrates your dollars where they will do most good”
- The mechanics of direct marketing have changed beyond recognition: near-zero cost per send, instant tracking, A/B testing in hours rather than months
- The principle has not changed: sending the same message to everyone is wasteful, and increasingly damaging to deliverability
- “Glittering generalities” was Ogilvy’s term for vague, non-committal copy. It still describes the main symptom of an unsegmented approach
- A practical starting framework: active buyers, engaged non-buyers, dormant contacts, new subscribers. Each needs a different message and a different close
- The tools to build this are already in your email platform. The barrier is thinking, not technology
Want to make your email list work harder?
We help SMEs get more from the email and CRM tools they already pay for. If your list is large but your results are flat, segmentation is usually the first place to look.