Segmenting your email marketing lists can help you connect with your customers in a personalized manner and increase the open and click-through rates. However, identifying the best way to segment your contacts can be a daunting task. To simplify it, we’ll discuss five easy strategies for email marketing segmentation.
But before that, let’s discuss the basics.
What is email marketing segmentation?
Email marketing segmentation is the grouping of a business’ email subscribers into smaller segments based on their geo-location, demographics, online behavior, etc. Segmentation helps brands and businesses deliver more relevant marketing messages to each subscriber base rather than sending a generic message to the entire mass. You can simplify sending messages to your targeted audience using email marketing automation software.
Why is email marketing segmentation important?
Email marketing segmentation allows you to send specific messages to different groups of subscribers. The content can be crafted to address the unique needs of the segment. This lowers the chances of sending emails that aren’t relevant to the subscribers and increases the likelihood of the emails being read.
Here are more reasons why email marketing segmentation is important.
- Your email list has multiple buyer personas and people passing through different stages of the buyer’s journey. So, your messaging needs to address each category’s need specifically.
- With personalized emails, your conversions can go up.
- With customer segmentation, you can gain a favorable reputation.
- Giving a self-segmentation choice to email subscribers increases engagement
5 Easy strategies for email marketing segmentation
Email segmentation certainly is beneficial for refining your marketing messages for each section. Here are five easy ways to segment your email list.
1. Demographic segmentation
The foremost and most basic way in which many marketers segment their email list is on the basis of their demographic data. They use data such as age, gender, marital status, language, occupation, industry, income level, and job description collected during the email sign-up process to group their customers.
Demographic data can indicate a person’s needs and interests and thereby improve product relevance and advertising effectiveness. For instance, if you run a clothing store, this segmentation will help you send emails with women’s apparel to female customers, men’s apparel to men, and kids’ clothing to married customers.
2. Geographic segmentation
Another basic type of email marketing segmentation is geographic segmentation. Here, subscribers are grouped based on regional factors like region, country, city, and postal code. This is particularly useful if you want to send customized emails based on location attributes like local customs, traditions, language, weather, or events.
For instance, if you have an online book store in India, you can target customers from North India with books written in Hindi, English, Punjabi, Bengali, Urdu, etc., and those from South India with books written in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, and Hindi. This will help avoid presenting customers with products irrelevant to them.
3. Behavioral segmentation
This is a deeper level of segmentation that studies onsite customer behavior to segment them. It involves analyzing how long users are staying on a page, how many pages does an average visitor views, who are on the verge of conversion, who are your bargain hunters, who are your high spend buyers, who make impulse purchases, who are browsing your overall product pages, who add things to cart but leave without buying, or who visit often but do not buy, and many more.
Such segmentation allows you to send specific email campaigns. For instance, you can promote higher-margin products to your high spend buyers; make the latest product recommendations to those at the verge of conversion; send abandoned cart emails to those who have left things in their cart; target bargain hunters with price drop emails; send emails highlighting your hottest deals and most popular products to people browsing your overall pages; and so on.
4. Purchase history-based segmentation
Segmenting your subscribers based on their past purchases is yet another way to optimize targeting. This kind of segmentation will facilitate-
- Sending emails recommending products similar to their previous purchases.
- Sending emails recommending accessories that would blend well with their preceding purchase.
- Sending emails reminding them of products that require renewal, refilling, or replacement based on their possible needs. For instance, if a customer has bought a particular cosmetic product, you may make an informed guess about when it might get used up and send an email suggesting a reorder at the right time.
This way, segmentation can serve as one of your best customer retention strategies.
5. Customer satisfaction level-based segmentation
No business can achieve the complete satisfaction of all its customers. While marketing to your customers, if your tone is carefree and happy, it’ll make unsatisfied clients feel even more frustrated and unheard. On the other hand, if your tone is serious, it’ll make you happy, customers may feel worried and wonder as to what is wrong. This is where segmenting users based on their level of satisfaction with your business can help.
So, segment your email list into different groups based on their levels of satisfaction with your brand. Target unhappy customers with messages that focus on resolving those issues they faced in the past. If a customer is doubtful, keep him/her informed of the steps you are taking to win them back.
Final Thoughts
Segmentation can help you send highly-personalized and targeted marketing emails to your email list. In this blog we’ve suggested 5 easy email segmentation strategies including demographic, geographic location, behavioral, purchase history, and customer satisfaction level-based segmentation.
Other than these, you can also group your subscribers based on their level of email engagement, stage in their buyer or user journey, time since their last purchase, psychographic factor (interests, hobbies, personality, beliefs, values, life goals, etc.), etc. A good email marketing tool like NotifyVisitors can help you in powerfully segmenting your subscriber base and automating campaigns.
