Sending a generic, un-tailored email to every subscriber on your list is definitely the first thing why the email we sent gets ignorant. That’s why email segmentation comes into play to help you “sell” the right thing to the right people.
Email segmentation divides your email list into smaller groups based on specific criteria. But how can you divide your group of contact lists? Let’s look at some tips we at ROI Digitally have done efficiently before.
How Many Segmentations Can You Use To Categorize Your Contacts?
Email segmentation goes beyond just dividing subscribers into smaller groups; it’s a powerful way to understand subscribers’ needs and communicate with them more effectively. Therefore, businesses must define their email segmentation strategy based on their goals, target audience, and customer journey. Here are some common ways we use to define email segmentation:
- Demographic segmentation: dividing subscribers by age, gender, income, location, education, etc.
- Behavioral segmentation: dividing subscribers based on their past actions, such as purchase history, website activities, email opens, and clicks, among others.
- Psychographic segmentation: dividing subscribers based on their interests, values, lifestyle, personality, and attitudes.
- Buyer persona segmentation: dividing subscribers based on their fictional representation of the ideal customer based on market research and data analysis.
Here is an example of how we segment the contact into different lists based on the type of interest, their sources (where we found them), and their behavior towards the emails sent to them before:
Why Should You Use Email Segmentation To Nurture And Retain Online Audiences?
The daydream is we all want our newsletters or email campaigns to land directly in an individual’s mailbox. We know that email segmentation is one of the keys to making the dream come partly true as it helps:
- Increase click-through and open rates: Sending personalized and relevant content to subscribers leads to higher engagement. Compared to non-segmented campaigns, segmented email campaigns have a 100.95% higher click-through rate and a 14.31% higher open rate as the viewers know that the email subject speaks their voice, and once they read the content inside, they know the information or the deal is for them.
- Decrease spam complaints and increase deliverability: Sending your readers relevant material lowers the possibility that they may categorize your emails as spam. This also improves your email campaign’s deliverability as email services like Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo trust you more and learn that your high-quality content won’t be extended to the Spam box.
- Boost conversions and sales: The right deal comes to the right person who needs it when they want to go shopping online. Email segmentation allows businesses to create more personalized campaigns that resonate with subscribers’ needs and easily sneak the upselling or cross-selling tactics to convert even more sales. Once your audience reads your email content, they will likely keep reading to look for better deals and options.
- Email segmentation brings other expected benefits for the business, including improving customer retention, strengthening customer relationships, and decreasing bounce rate and unsubscribe rates by sending subscribers personalized and relevant deals that they want to see or don’t even know they need.
5 Tips To Start Your Business’ Email Segmentation Effectively
1. Know your audience’s action flow
It’s always the safest and most effective to start by understanding your customer journey. Their needs, preferences, and behavior are decisive factors in effective email segmentation. Collecting detailed information about your subscribers’ demographics, interests, purchase history, and preferences through surveys, web forms, or analytics can help you segment your email list more effectively.
2. Real-time segmentation and personalization
Implementing real-time segmentation and personalization based on subscriber behavior and interests can help businesses deliver more timely and relevant content to subscribers.
For instance, sending abandoned cart, welcome, promotional, and event-triggered emails based on subscriber behavior can help improve engagement and conversion rates.
3. Implement attractive subject lines
A compelling subject line is the first thing your subscriber sees in their inbox, so crafting an attractive subject line that speaks directly to their needs is essential. Use powerful words, statistics, numbers, and personalization tactics to grab their attention and boost your open rates. Here are some brief examples that we use in ROI Digitally’s email marketing campaigns, with only a few beginning characters to trigger the users’ curiosity:
4. Engage new subscribers with onboarding emails
Well-tailored welcome emails can reach a whopping 50% open rate, making them a valuable opportunity to engage with new subscribers. Try to create an automated series of onboarding emails that welcome new subscribers, provide information about your brand, and offer incentives to purchase! But carefully consider the “hard-sell” call-to-action like “Click here”, or “Buy now”, because you just welcomed them into your house to know about you. Don’t rush too hard into selling them anything before they can explore and trust you more!
5. Tools for tracking and analyzing
Regardless of how great your email campaigns are, there is always room for improvement. Using analytics tools like Google Analytics 4, Hubspot Reports, Mailchimp Analytics, or your current email provider report system can help track your campaigns’ performance and identify areas for improvement, enabling your business to continue to grow and improve. Hubspot leaves us a great impression as they offer insightful features like HTML click map, Time spent viewing email, Opens by email client,…to collect data and deeply analyze user behavior and intent towards email content.
Email segmentation is an essential component of any successful email marketing strategy. By dividing your email list into smaller groups based on specific criteria, businesses can send custom messages that resonate with their audience’s interests, resulting in higher engagement, conversions, and loyalty rates.
Implementing these methods has allowed us to maximize the potential of your email marketing strategy with these strategies. Now, it is your turn to make a change!
Co-Founder & General Manager @ ROI Digitally
3 Common Customer Behaviors & 4 Key Customer Personas