Email segmentation is the process of sorting the contacts on your email list into different groups or segments. Why? So you can be sure that your email contacts will receive only relevant contact during your email marketing campaigns. People who have an interest in your brand might not mind receiving those emails. On the other hand, other people could just label your email irrelevant and unsubscribe. Why should you lose customers over irrelevant content, when your next email campaign could feature content they’ll love and that will even persuade them to buy? Email marketing segmentation is the answer.
How to Segment an Email List
How you segment your email list depends on what type of business you do. If you market to other businesses (B2B), or people who work in other businesses, you might want to categorize your email list by the different industries in which your customers work. You don’t want to send emails about materials for kindergarten students to university professors. Sort your contacts according to job, company or industry. Marketing to individual customers (B2C) means categorizing by age, gender, or if you have some more detailed information, by persona. The situation in business to customer marketing is different to business to business marketing.
What is Email List Segmentation?
The segmentation of an email list is simply the process of dividing your email list into different target groups depending on their common bond. All the males, all the females, members of a particular age group, workers in a certain industry. Whatever is the common denominator of a particular group, be it cat owners, dog owners, practitioners of a particular craft, keep your list segmented according to the target customer’s area of interest. That’s the first step in a successful segmented email campaign.
What is a Segmented Email Campaign?
A segmented email campaign is an email marketing campaign that aims to increase sales by targeting customers with content that’s particularly relevant to their needs and interests. Instead of sending out one-size-fits-all emails to every email on the list, the campaign targets particular customers who are expected to respond in a positive way to the campaign because of their particular needs and interests. If a particular campaign is not relevant to certain customers, they should not receive these campaign emails. When a relevant campaign starts, they can then be targeted by appropriate and relevant emails.
Email Marketing Segmentation – Some Tips & Tricks
There are a few tips for making the email segmentation work better to convert leads and bring in sales. Let’s take a look at them.
Choose An Email Marketing Service
Use an email marketing service that can help you with email marketing. Check out as many of these services as you can. You will find they will have different pricing tiers depending on the volume of email you send. Start at the lowest pricing tier and as your list grows, you can upgrade.
Create a Lead Magnet
Create a lead magnet to attract your ideal customer, or customers. Based on which lead magnet for which they sign up, you can get an idea of the interests of the new subscriber. The lead magnet could be an ebook or a checklist created around the customer’s area of interest. If a new subscriber signs up for several lead magnets, you may like to add them to several different segments.
Respect Subscriber Preferences
At the start of a new subscriber relationship, your welcome email should arrive immediately. Check with your subscriber regarding frequency of emails. If you’re a keen email marketer, you may like sending out several targeted emails every week. If you send out more than one email per week, you must ask your subscriber if this is acceptable. Some subscribers may even prefer monthly emails. Take their preference on board.
Target One-Off Purchasers
Find the purchasers who have bought from you only once. Send them regular emails. Give them discount coupons to win them back.
Reward Frequent Customers
Use targeted emails to reward frequent customers with discount coupons. These customers are likely to develop a relationship with your company over time. This way, it’s easy to keep them coming back to buy regularly from you.
Email Segmentation Statistics
Personalized emails work. According to the Optinmonster blog, 82% of marketers report improved email opening rates due to email personalization. When emails are targeted correctly, the receiver opens and reads. Segmented email campaigns tend to have over 14% higher opening rates than non-segmented email campaigns. Studies also report over 100% higher click through rates for segmented email campaigns, as opposed to non-segmented campaigns. According to Experian, personalized emails bring in six times the amount of income and transaction rates. So email marketing segmentation is well worth exploring.