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Good advice from industry journal Practical ECommerce: “When ecommerce marketers make their New Year's resolutions, they should include improved email segmentation and personalization.”

They should also forget the “lose weight,” “make up with my ex” and “start exercising” ones while they’re at it. “Drink more good red wine” would be a fine example of a New Year’s resolution one is more likely to keep. And hey, we all want doable resolutions, don’t we?

Email segmentation, they explain, is simply the idea of organizing email-marketing lists so each group of recipients receives a relevant, even personalized, marketing message. Of course to do this, as they note, you need to first learn something about customer preferences, demographics, desires, and even devices.

Taking a real-life example, "If you were purchasing television spots for Coors Light Beer, would you choose to have your ads appear on the children's program Dora The Explorer?" asked Curt Keller, CEO and founder of Benchmark Email.

Well, Curt, it depends what media market we’re talking about here (pause for laughter). But seriously folks, the answer is “no.” So, asks Keller, does it make sense for an email marketer to “batch and blast precisely the same newsletter to every single subscriber on your list, regardless of age, gender, or previous behavior?"

All together now: “No, Curt, it doesn’t.”

The journal sees two specific trends in 2012 that will heighten the importance of such segmentation. “An increasing number of email recipients will be reading emails on mobile devices with dramatically different email client capabilities,” and “improvements in email filtering will make it easier for recipients to tune out messaging that is not directly aimed at them.”

In other words, if you don’t segment properly, your customers -- current customers, anyway -- are going to ignore you. And probably get hacked off that you’re wasting their time.

After all, as Practical ECommerce noted, “one in ten email recipients are reading emails on a mobile device.” Marketers, you need to accurately identify those subscribers, make sure they get the mobile-optimized version. You know how now you ask if customers want the HTML version or not? Yeah, it’s like that.

Otherwise you’re just wasting everybody’s time, yours included. A November 2011 survey of 1,001 shoppers aged 13 and older from The Relevancy Group and Stream Send, cited by Practical ECommerce, found that “72 percent of respondents had deleted an email marketing message because it was not relevant to them, and 79 percent of recipients age 27-to-32 said that deleting irrelevant emails was a common behavior.”

Segmenting emails based on job title, customer type, or even zip code is how you cope with that, and avoid such a grisly fate.

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