Bet you didn't know these 5 fun facts about strawberries :)

Start brushing up on your strawberry trivia now, and get psyched for the 2017 South Boston Strawberry Festival coming on May 13!

I got up this morning to find these emails in my inbox (on top of many others):

• a dating site promo to find the man of my dreams
• kids & teens tickets on sale for a festival (woohoo!)
• why I need a penis enlargement

What do they have in common? (besides the fact that I never asked to be added to the senders' lists, but let's pretend I did) None of them are in any way applicable to me and my interests. I'm a happily married woman with no kids at home, so not one of those emails would be interesting to me, even if I had subscribed to the lists.

Every day businesses all over the US send irrelevant emails to people who HAVE asked to be added to their email lists. That's not only a waste, but a breach of the trust you had to earn to even get a person on your list.

Sending out email blasts is today's equivalent of throwing everything against the wall in the hopes that something sticks.

The sad thing is that it's so easy to send emails that people actually look forward to getting, netting you high open and click-through rates which help nurture your list.

It's crazy that marketers can't understand that simply sending information to the people who are interested in receiving it is the absolute best way to grow a business.

Email segmentation is the most effective tool in your toolbox. Consider data like:

• Segmented email campaigns have a 14.32% higher open rate than non-segmented campaigns. (Mailchimp, 2016)
• Triggered emails have a 624% higher conversion rate than “batch and blast” emails. This is driven by a 381% higher click rate, and an 180 percent higher post-click conversion rate. (Source: VentureBeat, 2016)

Don't get smug if you think you're already segmenting, though.

The report also shows that even though 75% of survey respondents claimed to segment their lists, most of them are only segmenting by demographics. That's much less successful than more advanced tactics like segmenting by purchase history, click-through rates, type and amount of purchase and online purchase history.

The problem is that most marketers are busy working on campaigns, and think they don’t have the time or resources to make regular email segmentation a reality.

The answer is automated email segmentation.

By using the right email marketing system, you can automate the entire list segmentation process.

Imagine being able to send highly targeted emails to the people who actually want to get that information, without you having to manually add and remove people from your segmented mailing lists. That would be marketing gold!

If you're using the right email marketing system, you can actually set up rules that automatically add to and remove contacts from specific lists based on actions they take. Things like downloading a PDF, filling out a form, or visiting a specific page on your website can automatically segment a person into a specific list.

Think about it in everyday terms. You could do things like automatically email:

• everyone who signed up for a Model Home tour
• everyone who didn't open a certain email
• everyone who owns a car that's coming due for a service date.

The cool thing is that you don't have to email them all at once. The rules you set up can email a person when and if they meet the criteria.

There's plenty of information your own business can share, too, depending on the type of business you're in. It could be sales and promotions, helpful tips and reminders, current developments in your industry – whatever would be valuable and appreciated by the people in a particular segmented list.

The best way to get started? Just start brainstorming ways that you could break up your customer list into segments of people who have something in common. And we can set you up on our email marketing system if you don't already have a system that offers advanced automation (hint: few do).

Don't miss our free resources to help in your online marketing, and become a Glerin Insider member (it's free!) to get exclusive access to content that we don't publish on the site and early access to new free resources that we publish.

I hope you already know that email marketing is THE most cost-effective marketing tool you have access to. If you don't, here's the deal: for 10 years in a row, email marketing has generated the highest ROI for marketers.

For every $1 spent, email marketing generates a return on investment of $38!

If you're not seeing this kind of success, though, I'm willing to bet I already know what you are and aren't doing...

Our office is located on Bannister Lake in the town of Halifax, Virginia. Last summer someone abandoned a poor little duck on the lake; he she (we found out it's a girl!) would come around when we kayaked, but would never come close. This past January we had a snowstorm of about 10" and the temperature was close to 0; we were able to find him her hiding in brush - covered in ice and snow, and frantic with hunger. We started feeding him her off of the dock, and he she started coming back every evening at 5pm to eat.

When we're not there by 5, we can hear him her quacking all the way up at the office (one of the secrets to whether a duck is a girl or boy? the girls are LOUDER! lol). Our office is at the top of a tall hill, and today we saw his her little white head bobbing around at the top of the hill so we took the hint and went out to feed him her.

Once he'd she'd had enough, he she waddled back down the hill and swam away :) I hate that somebody was cold enough to abandon him her, but we sure do get a lot of joy from having him her around!

Did you know that there's a way you can actually know everything an individual visitor does on your website?

If you use Google Analytics or similar, no doubt you know information like how many visitors come to your site, the countries they're from, and how many times each page is visited. That's nice to know, but in reality it doesn't really tell you much.