Lucero says segmented lists replied 11x better

Matt Lucero posted the numbers from three campaigns run for a single customer, and says the only thing separating them was how tightly the list was cut. Two of the three were what he calls a very segmented audience, and both returned one positive reply per roughly 450 emails sent. The third was a very broad list, and it returned one positive reply per roughly 5,000 emails sent.

That is about eleven times the send volume to produce the same single positive reply. Same customer, same operator, three campaigns, which is why this reads as one account's comparison rather than a benchmark anyone should plan against. Lucero does not say what the offer was, who the lists targeted, or how many emails went out in total.

The three levers

His framing is that campaign conversion moves on three things, offer, segmentation and competition. Offer and competition are business fundamentals, the kind of thing you cannot change between Tuesday and Thursday. Segmentation is the one that sits entirely on the cold email side of the wall, so it is the lever an operator can actually pull without a conversation with the founder.

He is also honest about the ceiling on it, which is the part worth reading twice.

Segmentation obviously requires more work & in some cases doesn't get THAT much better results... but it rarely hurts

That caveat matters because the 450 versus 5,000 gap is the strong version of the result, not the typical one. Lucero is not claiming every broad list collapses by a factor of eleven when you chop it up. He is claiming the downside of segmenting is work, and the upside is sometimes large.

For people sending

The practical move he suggests is cutting lists into smaller pieces and rewriting the scripts to match each piece, not just splitting the same copy across narrower audiences. The segmentation does nothing on its own if the email still reads like it was written for everyone. In his words, chop up the lists and make the scripts more targeted on the next campaign.

The tradeoff is volume per variant. A broad list lets you send one script to everybody, and in this case it still produced positive replies, just at a rate that needed roughly 5,000 sends to get one. Segmenting means more scripts, more lists and more maintenance for the same total send, which is the cost Lucero is pricing when he says it requires more work.

Treat the 450 number as what one agency saw on two campaigns for one customer, not as a reply rate you should expect. The direction of the finding is the usable part. The magnitude is one account's.

Matt Lucero

@MattLucero_

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Segmentation obviously requires more work & in some cases doesn't get THAT much better results... but it rarely hurts