What Is Email Segmentation? (And Why Should I Be Doing It?)
Have you recently started sending out email blasts or newsletters on behalf of your business? Congrats! Email is a hot marketing tactic because you know it’s going to people who are interested in what you have to offer. You’re not putting forth content at the mercy of an algorithm, nor are you paying for ads targeted at users based on what Meta thinks those users might like.
With email, these are people who signed up to hear from you. Now the question is—how do you maximize that advantage? The answer is through email segmentation.
Even though you know everyone who signed up for your email is interested to some degree, you still have a wide variety of people. You have deeply interested people and people who are mildly interested. You have people with plenty of discretionary spending, or you have people who might think a little bit harder on every purchase they make. You even have people who are located right around the corner from your physical location, and you have people who might need to patronize you via online ordering exclusively.
Email segmentation is how you make sure the right emails are going to the right members of your audience. By segmenting your email recipients, you are targeting them more personally—and you’ll be able to address their specific needs. In turn, you’ll get better results.
Reasons You Should Segment Your Emails
Need further encouragement? Here are three reasons that segmented emails are more effective:
1) You’re able to tailor the message and goal of your email newsletter
Some newsletters are just about building trust or maintaining a relationship. Some emails are about extending a special offer. When your emails are segmented, you are able to send the email your customer needs to see.
2) You improve your open rate
When people feel as if your email actually means something to them, they’ll look forward to reading it instead of dismissing it as junk mail. Improving your open rate improves your conversion rate—you can’t actually sell anything if people aren’t opening your emails.
3) You’ll retain your email subscribers
It’s not just about getting your subscribers to open their emails—it’s about keeping them interested in continuing to receive them. When people keep feeling as if generic emails intended for everyone except for them keep coming their way, they are going to hit that unsubscribe button really fast.
Ways You Can Segment Your Email List
There’s no right way or wrong way to segment your email list—there can even be overlap among who gets what emails. Think about the different audiences that you want to speak directly to.
Here are some popular ways of segmenting up email addresses:
Demographics
If you collected information about your subscribers, you can create different lists based on age or age range, gender, marital status, job, income level, or education level.
Geographical
Segment your emails based on how far they are from your location, or just by whether they’re local or from out of town. If you run an online business and you don’t have a physical location for them to be close to, you might consider segmenting your addresses based on time zones.
Marketing Preferences
Some people love to receive emails. Other people don’t. By dividing your email lists based on their preferences when it comes to digital marketing, you can maintain an active presence in the view of those who love digital content, and you can reserve your outreach until you actually have something really valuable to offer to those who don’t like it so much.
Purchase Status
Which email subscribers have actually bought something from you before, and which ones have just shown interest or maybe taken advantage of a freebie? Your message will be a little bit different depending on which audience you’re talking to. And maybe you’ll want to offer a special discount to somebody who has patronized you before.
Getting Hyper-Specific With Email Segmentation
If you have the capabilities to collect certain data from your website, you can divide your email addresses into hyper-specific categories. Do you know which products or services your customers looked at on your site (but didn’t actually purchase)? Maybe you could offer them a special discount on that product or a similar product?
Do you have a customer who comes to your website every single week or even every single day? This sounds like a highly interested customer, but just needs a little final push of convincing to actually make a purchase.
And finally, you can look into specific aspects of past purchases. Did they make several purchases right in a row, then stop purchasing? It might be time for a follow-up email. Do they spend frequently, but never make big purchases? Maybe you should offer them a discount or a bonus when they spend above a certain price point.