Email segmentation helps you deliver the right message to the right audience and avoid your messages being marked as SPAM. Many emails are lost in the SPAM folder because the sender failed to follow email segmentation best practices. If you’re throwing a party and sending out invitations. Would you send the same invitation to your grandma as you would to your friends in college? Probably not. Instead, you’d send each invitation to match the interests and expectations of your guests. That’s exactly what email segmentation does for your email marketing campaigns. Email segmentation is the secret brain box that turns your email campaign into personalised, high-converting messages.
By dividing your email list into smaller ones, you can send relevant messages to each of your subscribers based on their interests. Whether aiming to boost open rates, drive more conversions, or build better relationships with your audience, segmenting your email list is the key. Segmenting your email lists helps you to build better engagement, reduce churn, and grow user loyalty over time. In this post, we’ll look at the best practices for segmenting your email list to perfection.
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What is Email Segmentation?
Email marketing segmentation involves dividing your subscriber list into smaller, distinct groups based on specific criteria or common traits such as sex, location, company, buying interest, and preferences. The idea is to tailor your email marketing messages to each segment, sparking action by addressing their specific interests, preferences, and needs.
While email marketing is still the most cost-effective and reliable way to position and communicate your brand’s message to people daily, email marketing faces challenges like misleading spam, digital clutter, and irrelevant promotions. You need to send relevant messages to your audience because if your emails aren’t relevant, they get lost in your subscribers’ inboxes. Remember, your email list isn’t a single entity but a mix of diverse audiences, each needing a unique approach. Instead of sending the same message to everyone, email segmentation helps you deliver the right message to the right people.
Benefits of Email Segmentation
Every customer journey begins with resonated messaging. Email segmentation lays the foundation for sending targeted email campaigns to the attention of the recipients.
By segmenting your email list, you achieve the following benefits:
- Higher Open Rates
People would rather open an email that speaks directly to them than the one they feel was sent to everyone. Segmented emails cater to the reader’s interests, making them more likely to open them. It’s like getting a personalized invitation to a party instead of a generic flyer.
- Better Click-Through Rates
When your emails are tailored to specific groups, the content resonates more, leading to more clicks on your links. When you send an email with a recommendation of new arrival handbags in your store to customers searching for bags, chances are, they’ll click through to see it!
- Lower Unsubscribe Rates
People like opening relevant emails. Segmenting your list reduces the chances of annoying your subscribers. It’s like being in a bookstore where all the books are ones you love—you wouldn’t want to leave, right?
- Increased Sales and Revenue
Targeted emails can more effectively guide subscribers down the sales funnel. For instance, sending a discount code to a segment of users who have previously purchased but haven’t in a while can encourage them back to your store. Email Segmentation helps you to know exactly when to offer a free sample to someone in your online store.
- Improved Customer Retention
Happy customers stick around. By sending relevant and timely content, you keep your audience engaged. Think of it as having regular, meaningful conversations with a friend—those relationships last longer.
- Better Data Insights
Segmentation allows you to analyse which groups respond best to what types of content. This data can be gold when planning future campaigns. It’s like having a roadmap that shows where you’ve been successful and where you need to improve.
- Enhanced Personalization
Segmentation helps you to personalize your messages more effectively. From using the subscriber’s name to suggesting products based on their past behaviour, personalization makes your emails feel like a one-on-one chat rather than a broadcast.
- Reduced Spam Complaints
Irrelevant emails often end up being marked as spam. Ensuring your emails are relevant to each segment reduces the risk of marking your email as SPAM.
- Efficient Marketing Spend
Focusing your resources on targeted segments means you get more value for your money. It’s like planting seeds in fertile soil rather than scattering them everywhere and hoping something grows.
- Boosted Engagement
Engagement is the name of the game in email marketing. Segmented emails are more engaging because they address the specific needs and interests of your audience.
- Higher Conversion Rates
All these benefits lead to the ultimate goal: higher conversion rates. When your emails are relevant and timely, subscribers are more likely to take the desired action, whether purchasing, signing up for a webinar, or downloading a guide.
Understanding Your Audience
Segmenting your email list allows you to address your subscribers based on their specific needs. To start segmenting your audience, you first need to gather accurate data to inform your email segmentation strategy. One of the best ways to do this is by creating buyer personas, “fictional representations of your ideal customers based on research and data”.
How is this data collected?
- Conduct Market Research
Begin by conducting market research and gathering data about your existing customers. Use in-app surveys, interviews, focus groups, and social media research to gather insights and organize your personas. Look for commonalities, patterns, and trends among your customers to identify key characteristics.
- Analyse Demographics
Build a foundational understanding of your customers and their backgrounds using demographic information such as age, gender, location, occupation, income, and education level.
- Identify Psychographics
Dig deeper into your customers’ Psychographics, including their interests, hobbies, values, attitudes, and lifestyles. Identifying their Psychographics will help you understand their motivations, preferences, and behaviours, which are core purchase drivers.
- Uncover Pain Points
Get familiar with your customers’ pain points. Identify the challenges, common complaints, and workarounds your customers share related to your product or service. This information helps you avoid development pitfalls and allows you to tailor your marketing messages to address their specific needs.
- Determine Buying Behaviour
Understand how your customers research products, make purchase decisions, and their preferred channels or platforms. These insights will help you align your email segmentation techniques accordingly.
- Create Persona Profiles
After gathering and analysing the data, create fictional personas representing different sub-groups of your target audience. Each persona should have a name, photo, demographic details, and a narrative description that brings them to life.
- Use Personas for Data Collection
Use your new personas as a guide for collecting data. When conducting surveys, interviews, or analysing customer data, ensure you capture information relevant to each persona. This allows you to segment your data and gain insights specific to customer segments.
Remember, personas evolve as you gain more information and understand your audience. Regularly update and refine your personas to ensure they remain representative of your target customers!
Types of Email Segmentation
There are limitless ways to segment your email list for effective communication, but using these segmentation types can help you send the right message to the right person at the right time to boost your email marketing effectiveness.
- Demographic Segmentation
This involves segmenting your email list based on demographic information like age, gender, income, education level, or occupation. For instance, a clothing retailer might send different promotions to men and women or target high-income earners with luxury items. Alternatively, a skincare brand may send different product recommendations to men and women, with anti-aging creams targeted at older subscribers and acne treatments for younger age groups.
- Geographic Segmentation
Geographic email segmentation divides your list based on location—country, state, city, climate, population density or neighbourhood. This is handy for local promotions or region-specific offers. For example, a restaurant chain can promote a new menu item only in the cities where it’s available. An e-commerce website promoting a summer sale can also email customers in the northern and southern regions, highlighting season-appropriate items.
- Behavioural Segmentation
This type looks at how subscribers interact with your emails and website. It includes factors like purchase history, email open rates, click-through rates, and past engagement. For instance, if someone always opens your emails about tech gadgets, you can send them more tech-related content.
- Psychographic Segmentation
Psychographic email segmentation is based on each subscriber’s lifestyle, interests, values, and personality traits. It’s more nuanced and requires a deeper understanding of your audience. For example, a fitness app can send different workout plans to subscribers interested in yoga, strength training, or running, based on their past activity and preferences.
- Firmographic Segmentation
Firmographic email segmentation is used in B2B marketing and involves segmenting based on company characteristics like industry, company size, and job roles. A software company might target different email campaigns to tech startups, medium-sized businesses, and large enterprises.
- Engagement Level Segmentation
Segment your audience based on how engaged they are with your emails. You might have segments for highly engaged subscribers, moderately engaged ones, and those who rarely open your emails. For example, a fashion retailer may send exclusive early access to a new collection to highly engaged subscribers while sending re-engagement emails with special discounts to those who have yet to open recent emails.
Treat your email list like a garden. Some plants need more water, and some need less—segment by engagement level to nurture each subscriber appropriately. Send re-engagement campaigns to the less active and exclusive offers to your loyal fans.
- Purchase History
This email segmentation strategy is based on what products or services subscribers have bought. This can help upsell or cross-sell relevant products. For example, if someone purchases a camera from your store, you could email them about accessories for their cameras.
- Email Type Preferences
Allow subscribers to choose what kind of emails they want to receive, like newsletters, promotions, product updates, etc. This ensures they only get the content they’re interested in, improving engagement and reducing unsubscribe rates.
- Sales Funnel Position
Segment your audience based on their stage in your sales funnel—awareness, consideration, decision, or post-purchase. Tailor your messages to move them along the funnel. For example, someone in the awareness stage might need more educational content, while someone in the decision stage might need a discount offer to make a purchase.
- Lifecycle Stage
Segment based on lifecycle stages such as new leads, active customers, repeat buyers, or churned customers. Each stage requires different messaging to keep the relationship strong.
- Source of Sign-Up
This type of email segmentation is based on knowing where your subscribers came from (social media, blog, paid ads, etc.), which can help tailor your messages. Subscribers from a blog might prefer educational content, while those from a product page might be ready for more sales-oriented emails.
Email Segmentation Best Practices: How to Segment Your Email Lists
Segmenting your email list is like being a chef in a busy kitchen – you need the right ingredients and a solid plan. To achieve effective email segmentation, ensure each segment is unique and covers all subscribers. No subscriber should belong to more than one segment, and every subscriber should fit into a segment. Many email marketing platforms, such as MailerLite, HubSpot, Moosend, ConvertKit, and Mautic, have built-in segmentation tools, offering user-friendly interfaces and automation features to make the process easier. You can use the contact management system (CMS) your email marketing platform provides to store and organize your subscriber data.
You can manage subscriber demographics, purchase history, and engagement data from your dashboard. Most email marketing platforms offer a virtual dashboard with various conditions and filters to help you define and refine your segments. Ensure your email marketing platform supports automation. Given the size and constantly changing nature of email lists, automation is essential for segmenting your entire subscriber base and keeping it updated. Personalizing content at scale requires intelligent automation, especially for businesses with growing email lists. Automation features should let you set up workflows triggered by specific actions or conditions. These workflows enable you to send targeted emails to specific segments based on predefined triggers, such as a subscriber’s behaviour or a particular date.
The following are the email segmentation best practices you can follow to ensure your email lists are well segmented as precise and effective as possible.
- Collect Relevant Data
Before segmenting your email list, gather as much information as possible about your subscribers.
- Demographics: Age, gender, location, and income.
- Behavioural Data: Purchase history, website activity, email engagement (opens, clicks), and browsing behaviour.
- Preferences: Self-reported interests, product preferences, and communication frequency preferences.
Pro Tip: You can collect subscriber data using sign-up forms, surveys, and preference centres.
- Clean and Organize Your Data
Imagine trying to cook with spoiled ingredients. Yuck, right? Keep your data fresh by regularly cleaning your email list. Remove duplicates, correct errors, and update outdated information. A clean email list reduces the likelihood of your email campaigns being marked as SPAM. Ensure your email list is clean by regularly updating and verifying your subscribers’ information. Remove inactive users and fix any incorrect data. Imagine sending a birthday discount to a subscriber, only to find out their birthdate was wrong. Awkward, right? Clean data prevents such mishaps.
You can automate your email list cleaning process with the help of tools like Zerobounce, Email List Verify and MailerLite. These tools will help you eliminate invalid, abuse, complaint, inactive, and spam-trap email addresses from your email list and ensure you send high volume emails without deliverability issues.
- Define Your Segmentation Criteria
Determine the key criteria that will guide your segmentation. Once you’ve identified your subscribers’ interests, preferences, and buying habits, you can use the data to segment your email list. Here are some common ones:
- Demographics: Create segments based on age, gender, location, etc.
- Engagement Level: Active subscribers vs. inactive ones.
- Purchase Behaviour: Frequent buyers vs. one-time buyers.
- Email Activity: Opens, clicks, and specific interactions.
- Personalize Your Content
Personalize your emails to fit each segment’s interests and behaviours. Use their names, recommend products based on past purchases, and send relevant content. That’s why segmentation is important; segmentation lets you personalize your content and promotions based on the preferences and behaviours of each segment in your list. You can create exclusive discounts, product recommendations, or incentives based on the purchase history of each segment in your list. Personalized emails increase the chances of driving conversions and continued engagement.
Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all email campaigns. Segment your audience based on their behavior, preferences, and past interactions to deliver highly relevant content. Think beyond just using their first name; tailor offers, recommendations, and even email timing to match their unique profiles.
Pro Tip: If you own a tech retail shop, you can send personalized emails based on user’s device preferences and different tips and product suggestions to Android and iOS users.
- Test and Optimize
The best chefs taste their food as they cook. Similarly, regularly test your segmentation strategy. Segmentation is not a “”one fit”” strategy. As your customers’ behaviour and preferences change, so will your segmentation groups.
Pro Tip: Experiment with different segmentation criteria and email content. Analyse the performance metrics to find what works best for your business.
You should regularly review the performance metrics of your segmented email campaigns. Track key metrics such as each segment’s open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and customer engagement levels. Identify segments with better engagement and those needing adjustment for a deep understanding of your audience. Keep communication with your audience as open and inviting as possible. Use surveys and polls to gather feedback, asking questions about their preferences, needs, and behaviours. You will need the data to fine-tune your segmentation strategies.
Embrace A/B testing! This method lets you experiment with different email content or offers to see which resonates best with each segment. Use A/B testing to compare how different segments respond to various emails. Tweak your approach based on the results.
- Respect Privacy and Preferences
Always respect your subscribers’ privacy and preferences. Allow them to update their preferences easily and choose what kind of content they want to receive. For instance, on your website, you can give your subscribers the option to choose their favourite categories so that you can engage them more with what they are interested in. Allow your subscribers to choose what kind of content they want to receive and how often. This not only builds trust but also keeps your list healthy.
Final Thoughts
Segmenting your email list is a must for your email marketing efforts. Email list segmentation helps you understand and target your audience’s needs and behaviours; you can deliver highly relevant content that boosts engagement and drives conversions.
Segmenting your email list based on subscriber’s interests is like having a secret recipe for marketing success. When you segment your email list into meaningful segments, you create a groundwork to craft personalized experiences for your subscribers. Remember to keep it simple: segment by demographics, behaviour, and preferences. Use your subscribers’ current data to constantly refine your segments, and remember to test and tweak your strategies. With these email segmentation best practices, you’ll see higher open rates and engagement and foster a loyal audience that feels understood and valued.
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