Why is Email Segmentation Important?

• Improved deliverability: Email segmentation increases engagement and sender reputation. This prevents your future campaigns from being sent to spam.

• Stronger relationships: Email segmentation helps your brand connect with individual subscribers by consistently sending personalized content. And this results in repeat purchases and customer loyalty. Thus, email segmentation can serve as one of your best customer retention strategies.

• Higher Conversion Rate and ROI: Studies have proven that segmented email marketing campaigns bring in 100.95% increased click rates and a 760% increase in email revenue than non-segmented ones.

• Better campaign results: Since email segmentation increases the relevancy of your campaigns to the recipients, there are better responses and results.

• Increased knowledge of your audience: By segmenting your contacts and personalizing campaigns, you gain a better understanding of your customers. You get to know what works and what doesn’t with each group.

1. Location

For instance, if you’re running an e-commerce business with an international presence, sending time-limited offer messages in bulk will end up shortening the time for people on the other side of the globe, resulting in frustrations.

Geographic location-based segmentation can also be of help to those businesses that make weather-based, traffic-based, language-based, season-based, cultural preference-based, or current news-based recommendations.

2. Demographics

Segmenting email contacts based on demographic data such as age, gender, education level, income, etc. is the most common type of segmentation practiced by businesses. You can get this info while your customers sign up for receiving emails from you.

For instance, if you’re a clothing brand, you’ll need to know their gender info; if you’re selling highly-priced goods, their income level would be of prime importance to you; if you’re a SaaS agency, their company position would aid you in your SaaS marketing; and so on.

3. Engagement level

For this, you need to look into your email marketing’s performance metrics such as open rates and click-through rates. Based on these analytics, you can group your subscribers into two groups viz., active users and inactive users.

You can send personalized campaigns to the active group asking them to refer your brand in the circle in exchange for a discount or cash prize. For the inactive group, start targeting them with re-engagement/re-activation campaigns.

4. Purchase history

By looking into your customers’ purchase history, you’ll get to know their needs and preferences and their shopping habits. That is, you’ll get an idea about what they buy and how much they spend.

5. Association with you

• New subscribers who haven’t yet purchased from you: It’s important you make a great first impression with your email marketing messages. So, run a campaign for this segment with a series of welcome emails. These should have inspirational content that introduces them to your brand and boost their interest in you.

• First-time customers: When a person buys from you for the first time, it means that he/she has started trusting you. Focus on building their trust through reviews, testimonials, and other user-generated content. Also, let them know more about your offerings and send them educational resources to help them make the most out of their purchase.

• Loyal customers: Studies say that customers who are loyal to a brand feel the need to be acknowledged by it. So, make regular, long-term customers feel special with VIP offers like special discounts, early access to new products, etc. You can also request a review from them or invite them to join your referral program and refer their friends to you.

• Inactive customers: Target those customers who’ve become silent for a while with retargeting campaigns. You can lure them back with a discount or offer on items of their interest. You can also come up with your own creative ideas to get their attention again.

Email Marketing Automation Tool Simplifies the Job for You

Segmenting your email contacts based on the above-discussed criteria isn’t a tough job. You just need a good email marketing automation software like NotifyVisitors. It has the capability to automatically segment your subscribers based on location, age, and almost any behaviour exhibited by them online.

Other than customer segmentation, it also has other attractive features like Gmail Extension (work out of Gmail), hassle-free migration services (bring in your email contacts from any platform that you’re using), effectual contact management, customizable automation goals, detailed data analytics of your campaigns, iOS CRM app (access contacts, send emails, update deals, and check tasks on the go!), and more.

Since it facilitates delivering the right message to the right people, your conversion rates increase, email deliverability increases, returns on investment heightens, and customer relationships strengthen via a better understanding of your customers.

In this blog, we’ve discussed email segmentation strategies to help you come up with the best-targeted campaigns. Do use an email marketing automation tool like NotifyVisitors to help you achieve desirable results from applying these strategies.

Email List Segmentation Best Practices

1) By Demographics

Chances are that your target audience lives in different locations around the world. It’s worth gathering all this information. Equipped with this information could help you tailor your messages based on where your audience comes from hence making your content more relevant to them.

Given that your email list comprises different people from different geographical locations it means they will open and engage with your emails at different times. And because you want to get more clicks and opens, then you want to send a message to your target audience at the right time. Sending messages to your target audience then they are offline is a waste of time. By the time these people are online, their inboxes will have too many emails and chances are that yours will be buried in the hip of emails. So, track the time when subscribers are active and send them emails at that time.

Once you have this information, you can then segment your email list based on the age and gender of your audience. This may help you to know what products to promote to what age of people of what gender.

Besides, you cannot promote accounting products to a person who deals with automotive parts. So you need to identify and differentiate these people so that you can target them individually with your messages.

2) By Geolocation

You can also target your audience based on weather patterns. For instance, if your brand is promoting rain jackets, knowing when it’s raining for your subscribers could help you reach out to them at the right time when they need rain jackets.

3) Based on Website Behavior

Usually, when a person lands on your website, they are probably going to visit certain pages of interest. You can use tools such as BeamPulse to monitor customer behavior on your website such as the menus they visited, icons they clicked, etc.

4) By Purchase History

You can also use customers’ purchase history to target them with messages promoting products that cater to their interests. This will help to drive more sales and create a long term relationship with your target customers.

5) Based on Survey Results

6) Based on Email Activity

7) By Cart Abandonment

Abandonment cart email doesn’t have to be complicated. You just need to include the most crucial elements which specifically include the item abandoned and a soft CTA that convinces a customer to carry on with the checkout process.

8) Based on the Type of Customer

These are customers who come what may; they will still use your products or services. You need to identify them as well. They might be subscribers who are clicking and opening your emails every time you send messages to them. Keep them engaged by sending special offers, discounts, and send surveys to know them more so you can improve your strategy.

This applies to brands that offer trial versions of their products. You need to find ways to convert these users or customers into buyers. You need to convince them to upgrade to your paid version of the products they are trying after the trial period has elapsed.

Here, you need to focus on educating them about the benefits they can get when the upgrade to the paid version, how to use the paid version, explain to them the features and how your product can help them achieve what they are looking for, etc.

This is where email segmentation gets complicated. Non-converters are the most difficult to convince. But you can send them surveys regularly until you identify their problems and learn more about them and then convince them to convert.

9) Based on the Purchase Amount

A good example of a brand that used this segmentation strategy is Intermix. The women’s clothing brand segmented their customers into three distinctive groups (VIPs-those that can spend more money on items, Sales shoppers- those who buy when offered discounts and Brand shoppers- those who are eager to buy but still doubt the price).

10) By CTA

If you send an email for a free masterclass and some people click on the link but don’t end up signing up, you can create a separate segment for them the next day and send an email nudging them a bit more to sign up since they have shown slight interest in it by clicking the CTA in the previous email.

Ready to do more business with email marketing?

Aastha Sirohi

Author and Content Marketer @ConstantContact. Aastha believes that words strung into meaningful stories have the power to drive the strongest emotions and actions. She also believes that dogs are the best thing to happen to mankind (along with coffee!).

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Resources:

https://www.notifyvisitors.com/blog/email-segmentation/#:~:text=Email%20segmentation%20involves%20dividing%20your%20list%20of%20email,audience/consumers,%20email%20segmentation%20segments%20only%20your%20email%20subscribers.
https://www.sendx.io/blog/email-segmentation
https://www.sendinblue.com/blog/email-list-segmentation/
https://www.canto.com/blog/email-segmentation/
https://www.constantcontact.com/blog/what-is-email-segmentation/