Email today is more about sending the subscribers what they want and creating a personalized user experience, rather than sending mass emails. List segmentation plays a key role in helping brands to create and deliver a personalized email experience to their subscribers.
Email segmentation helps in delivering targeted and tailor-made emails to each individual subscriber, thereby keeping it real and relevant. According to MailChimp, segmented campaigns get 14.31% higher open rates and 100.95% click rates as compared to non-segmented campaigns.
If you have a big list of email subscribers with varied interests, personas and behavior, you need to send them separate emails that are most relevant to them and for this, you need to study your email list thoroughly, divide them into proper segments, and craft and send emails accordingly.
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Let us go through the 7 basic ways of segmentation that every email marketer must implement in their email campaigns.
Active/Inactive – Do they engage with your emails?
Grouping your subscribers based on whether they are active or inactive is the most basic form of segmentation. Keep a check on your email opens and determine which subscribers are constantly engaging with your emails and which subscribers no longer open your emails. For those who do not engage with your emails anymore, set up a re-engagement email campaign and send regular promotional emails to those who open and click through your emails regularly.
Geography – What is their location?
Knowing your subscribers’ geographical location is very important. You would not want to send an email featuring your winter collection to someone in Australia where it is spring. Sending such irrelevant emails will lead to unsubscribes and inactive subscribers. You need to collect their geographic location data to send targeted emails that feature content that is most suitable for them at that particular time and location. Knowing your subscribers’ location also helps you send them emails at a time when they are most likely to open them.
Demographics – What is their Gender, Job title, Persona, etc.?
Information such as a person’s age, gender, job title, income level, etc. can tell a lot about them. This will help you in determining what type of content or offers will best suit their interests and lifestyle. Get all suitable information from them during the sign-up process and group them separately to send them emails that speak directly to them.
Interests – What interests them?
Knowing what interests your customers will help you to a great extent in creating relevant and targeted content. You can ask your audiences to mention their interests in the sign-up form or ask them to set preferences in your email preference center. By understanding their real interests and choices, you can easily create emails that cut through the noise.
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Past Purchase– What products/services have they bought from your brand?
Segmenting your subscribers and customers based on their past purchases is a great way to optimize targeted emails. Use their past purchase information to send emails that cater to their needs. Based on what they have purchased in the past, you can segment them to send emails that target their potential needs and interests.
Purchase Cycle – Are they frequent buyers or one-time customers?
The time since your subscriber/customer last bought from you can be a vital data to create and send emails. You cannot send the same email to someone who frequently buys from you and someone who bought one of your products six months ago but hasn’t been back since then. Your frequent customers are more interested in your brand and hence they need to be grouped differently. For the less-frequent or one-time customers, your emails should focus on bringing them back to your brand.
Site Behavior Data – What are the insights from their browse and purchase behavior?
Monitoring your subscribers’ behavior through email segmentation helps you in knowing what exactly they are looking for. Keep a check on the category of products they browse, the videos they watch, and the products/services they frequently visit and draw insights out of it. This will help you in creating better-targeted emails for every segment of your subscriber list.
Wrapping Up
A successful email campaign results from sending the right email to the right people at the right time. And this can be achieved by grouping your email database into smaller specific segments and sending suitable emails to each segment. Email segmentation when done right can improve brand identity and boost conversions for your email campaigns.
