It was a long and tiring day at work but you finally make it to your house. After clearly examining the fridge full of frozen ready to cook food, your inner MasterChef wakes up. And you decide to make yourself spaghetti and meatballs.
Now who doesn’t love that?
After cooking for what seemed like hours, you decide to sit and enjoy your meal. But then the worst happens, you find out that you forgot to put salt in your dish.
The result – Your dish tastes bland!
Reality check!
Email segmentation is like adding salt to your food among the many email marketing strategies. It will always be bland without salt, no matter how many flavorful ingredients you add.
Email segmentation allows you to categorize your customers into different groups based on their behaviors and demographics. This way, you deliver targeted emails highly relevant to the customers. Consequently, this increases your company’s ROI by 38 times due to personalization.
If you cannot unlock these benefits from email segmentation, do not worry.
We are here to teach you 15 genius tips to segment your emails and utilize all the features.
Table of Contents
- 1) Location
- 2) Level of Knowledge
- 3) Active & Passive Users
- 4) Website Activity & Traffic
- 5) Purchase History
- 6) Spending Habits
- 7) Customer Satisfaction
- 8) Subscription Payments
- 9) Email Layout
- 10) New Subscribers
- 11) Lead Magnet
- 12) Shopping Cart Abandonment
- 13) Birthday Wishes
- 14) Engagement Frequency
- 15) Demographic Segmentation
- Email List Segmentation Mistakes to Avoid
- Conclusion
1) Location
Regarding segmenting your email list, location data is the most basic one. You may want to segment your email list based on your target audience’s area of residence.
Segment based on geographic location can help you know the right time to deliver the emails. Most recipients check their emails in the morning. Sending an email during that time window will ensure that your email is one of the top ones in the inbox and will grab their attention.
This is not the only benefit, though.
Suppose you are sending a promotional email about a webinar or other events. In that case, you want to ensure you reach out to the maximum number of people who live nearby. You will send targeted emails to people in that area to increase the number of attendees.
Subscribers based in different countries will appreciate additional content targeting them and how they identify.
2) Level of Knowledge
You want to make sure you know your target audience’s skill set. This way, you can send them relevant content that is more personalized and useful.
Segment email lists to create smaller groups based on skill levels. The criteria for these groups can be your ideas. You want people of any skill level to be able to find the knowledge that they can apply.
This will ensure that they come back to you because they appreciate you.
3) Active & Passive Users
Every email list will have users who do not engage with the emails. Ideally, you should regularly filter out your subscribers’ list. This way, you can focus on the active subscribers who are interested and serious about your brand.
You can also try to re-engage the passive subscribers. Ask them if they want to receive emails in the future. Follow up by getting to know their preferences or reviews on your products.
Alternatively, you can introduce any new product line or ongoing sale to pique their interests. It is a great way to increase your business’s open rates. You can link any published article as well.
4) Website Activity & Traffic
Similarly, you can filter out active and inactive users through your site activity. This is a beneficial tool if you are an eCommerce business.
For the inactive user, you can create segments. A gentle email that lures them back in will do the trick.
5) Purchase History
This is one of the most innovative ways of segmenting your list. Pay attention to your customer’s purchase history. This way, you can provide them exclusive offers on other similar or complementary products to upgrade. Studies show that people are more likely to buy the recommended products.
You can also collect this behavioral data to send more personalized emails and keep them engaged.
6) Spending Habits
You can segment your buyers on the basis of their past spending behavior. You can then target products that fall under a similar price range.
Repeat shoppers are more likely to spend more as you have successfully built a level of trust.
Another advantage of tracking the amount of money your customers are spending is that you can filter out the ones who spend extravagantly. This is the group you want to target specifically to boost conversions. They are more likely to spend on new products.
7) Customer Satisfaction
This email segmentation strategy can work for you in two ways.
Firstly, you want to create a group of customers who are brand ambassadors for your company. For that you can email review forms asking customers if they will recommend this product to a friend or other contacts.
If they respond positively, you have scored a potential brand ambassador. You should engage with them even more so they do not unsubscribe.
Secondly, negative survey reviews can help you improve your product and services.
8) Subscription Payments
Sending emails to your subscribers reminding them when the subscription has to be renewed or upgraded is another email segmentation example. This is yet another confirmed way to be successful in email marketing.
Be prepared because it will also include people who want to cancel their subscriptions. This is the optimal time to offer them discounts or other such offers to change their minds.
9) Email Layout
Emails meant to be opened only on the laptop can ruin the experience. Most of your audience probably views the email campaigns on their phones.
The solution is to create a segmented email list based on the devices they use to check emails and messages. You might have sent the most relatable content.
Still, the message will not get across because it was not opened on a suitable device.
10) New Subscribers
Use email segmentation if you want to send a hello to a new subscriber.
A welcome email to new subscribers can inform them of what to expect. It is also a sweet gesture to make them feel welcome.
Include links to your blog post and other resources as well. It will allow them to learn more about your brand values and services.
11) Lead Magnet
You can segment your email list on the basis of lead magnets your consumers downloaded when they signed up. This is the best tactic to learn about their interests.
Plus, this will allow you to send a targeted email to the right people.
Ensure the subject line is catchy and related to increase your open rate.
12) Shopping Cart Abandonment
There could be multiple reasons why someone did not complete their purchase and left items in the cart abandoned. Maybe they were busy with something else or needed more time to think about the purchases.
Sending a reminder email is one of the clever segmentation strategies to encourage purchasing. You can also offer free shipping or suggest a few more products to them as an incentive.
13) Birthday Wishes
To nurture a relationship with your customers, you must make them feel valued. What better way to do it than a birthday discount or promotional code? However, give them a choice to opt out of this.
14) Engagement Frequency
You can track the data to see how your customers interact with your content. And how frequent are the visits on your page? This way, you can gauge their interest levels.
Users that engage more frequently are those you want to focus on more throughout the sales funnel.
It can also help you understand what type of content gets more engagement so that you can tailor emails based on the engagement frequency.
15) Demographic Segmentation
Another way to segment your email subscribers is based on social factors such as age, gender, income level, job title, and other characteristics. This is the data you can gather when people sign up for your emails or join the email list.
Email List Segmentation Mistakes to Avoid
You spent so much time and effort segmenting your email lists, but you are frustrated with the lack of email engagement.
There is one simple solution for that. You can work with an email marketing provider, such as MailerLite, to ensure such blunders can be avoided.
Here are some constant mistakes that email marketers make that reduce the effectiveness of list segmentation.
- Inauthentic Email Marketing Lists
The entire concept of email segmentation is to create personalized content. This is virtually impossible with bought or rented email lists. Moreover, with bought lists, there is a high chance that your email is landing in the spam folder. This will render all your hard work useless.
- Passive Subscribers
The conversion rate is the ratio of the number of CTAs to the total number of subscribers. So if you have many passive subscribers, your conversion rate could drop significantly.
Conclusion
Personalized content is the king in email campaigns. With email segmentation, you can achieve higher conversion rates and increase revenue through targeted and customized emails.
You want to cater to all your customers so that they convert instantly. Do not get overwhelmed by the email marketing tools that you forget the person using the screen is a human.
The goal is to focus on building a connection with your audience in your email marketing campaigns. The rest will follow.
