I use MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool to send automatic updates whenever we post new articles on our blog (subscribe here if you’re interested). Not a lot of people know about this, because it’s relatively new and I’m still tweaking stuff.

Yesterday, someone sent me an email and asked why I didn’t include the link allowing him to update his email address (a nifty feature in MailChimp, btw). Oops! Can’t believe I forgot to include that merge tag! It’s an important one, since they say about 30% of your list changes their email address every year.

I immediately fixed my template, so that all future updates will have the link. But I wanted to re-send yesterday’s campaign to that guy, along with that “update preferences” link in the footer. Hmm…

Then I remembered our segmentation tool. Lots of people use list segmentation to send emails to just one interest group on their list. But did you know you can also “micro segment” it down to one recipient? Here’s how I did it:

Or, let’s say I attended an event, and 5 new people subscribed to my list. Now, I’d really like those 5 new members to see the awesome newsletter that I sent last month.

Well, there are 2 ways to handle a situation like this.

The best way is to modify your welcome emails (which those 5 new members would’ve received when they opted-in to my list) so that they include links to “Our recent newsletters” (here’s a tutorial). Now, it’s automatic and I never have to log in to MailChimp to send stuff whenever new people join. Hey, I love MailChimp, but there are more important things to do in life.

But let’s say I’ve been too busy to figure out how to tweak my Welcome Email (even though we’ve got a really nice tutorial video here). And I really, really want to send those 5 new subscribers from the event my last month’s newsletter.

Here’s how I’d do it:

This would send last month’s newsletter to all the people who joined my list on the date of the event.

Or, if I had planned ahead and created a field on my signup form (maybe through our wufoo integration) asking people, “where’d you hear about me?” I could segment based on that.

Here are some other list segmentation ideas and articles you might want to look at:

• How List Segmentation gets 14% better open rate than average
• 3 quick list segmentation ideas from Jeanne Jennings
• Segment your list by domain names (handy if you’ve experienced problems with one ISP or company)
• Coaxing subscribers to give you more data (for segmentation)