Email Marketing Segmentation Strategies that Grow Your Business

Email marketing segmentation is a huge boon for businesses. Marketers know segmenting emails into various groupings not only improves open rates, but also click-through rates that ultimately lead to conversions.

Recent data provided by Mailchimp reveals that segmented campaigns receive 14.31% more opens and 100.95% more clicks.

Now more than ever, segmentation is proving to be a greatly effective strategy for businesses looking to drive customer engagement and sales.

It’s All About the Group

Email segmentation is all about the group, and the art of positioning subscribers into groups based upon different factors like: behavior, interests, age, gender, location, and so on. Depending on your industry and goals, the factors will adjust accordingly.

According to DMA, marketers have found 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns. This begs the question, if all your subscribers are different, why are you treating them like they’re all the same?

Established groups should be diverted into buckets fitting the factors you’ve outlined that then serve them specific and curated content and offers they’re most likely to take an action on.

What’s even cooler about segmentation is you can tap into your subscriber’s aspirational self, and not just target based upon where they are in their customer lifecycle. A tactic expertly used by luxury brands.

Segmentation Strategies:

Before dividing up your contact list it’s important to understand a few different proven segmentation strategies. In fact, these are strategies you can immediately adopt today so you can start seeing results tomorrow.

1. Demographics

Demographic data is your launching pad for segmenting your email subscribers into specific lists. Demographic data includes factors like age, gender, income level, company position, education, etc. Seemingly simple demographic data can tell you a great amount about your customer’s wants and needs, and therefore how you can serve them and even turn them into raving fans.

Our recommendation is to acquire as much demographic data from your customer upfront, without scaring them off of course. Whether they’re filling out a form to sign up for your newsletter or are in the purchase process, this is your opportunity to start them off correctly in your email funnel.

For example, if you’re an outdoor retailer, gender is probably at the top of your list so you know which products to suggest to your customers. If you’re a marketing consultant, then knowing your customer’s job title is valuable.

What metrics are the most integral for you business? Be sure to include these in your customer’s signup process.

2. Email Engagement

What better way to sort your customers than by the way they interact with the messages you’re already sending? Segmenting based on email engagement is a simple and effective method that will have a major impact on your results.

Thankfully email marketing services already do a bit of the leg work for us by providing open and clickthrough rates on each email you send. With these metrics you discover your active vs. inactive users.

An inactive user would be someone who hasn’t open an email in three months or more. This is a customer you want to bring back into the fold. Tailor a campaign to re-engage them, whether through a discount offer or a “hey we haven’t seen each other in awhile, check out what’s brand spanking new” type message.

Conversely, you can reach out to your customers that are highly engaged and repeat buyers. We’d call these people your fans. Announce to your fans about an upcoming sale that they’re receiving exclusive first-access to since they’re a loyal customer. If they clickthrough then mark them as “interested” or whatever label you deem appropriate. Then you can develop a specialized campaign to further target them as consistent (maybe even reliable) buyers.

3. Geographic Area

For businesses where geographic location makes a big impact on purchasing decisions then segmenting based on geographic location data is paramount.

A great example of a brand doing this right is Spirit Airlines. Every customer that uses Spirit must filled out basic information like sex, age, and address. The address category is what allows Spirit to target its customers based upon location.

If you’re living in San Diego, why would you care about flight deals out of Denver? You wouldn’t. And this is why geographic location data segmentation is powerful.

Spirit is able to target and supply customers with information, deals, and fun trip facts based upon where you live and where you’re headed. Thus driving open rates and engagement.

Here are a few more examples of ways to use geographic data:

• Location-specific content: Offer a personalized experience by including a specific location in your headline and/or content
• Advertise regional promotions: Offering a Pacific Northwest specific sale? Send focused emails for this promotion to customers in the region.
• Time-based: Send out email at optimum times for customers in different time zones

4. Personal Interest

This is where it gets a little trickier, however if you can pull it off it will greatly help with granular segmentation strategies. You can gain information on your customer’s personal interests by creating user profiles on your website or by using an email subscription center where they can tick off their purchasing or information interests.

You can invite them to do this either in the signup process or encourage them down the road in follow up emails to complete their profile online. Having this information is an amazing tool to help you target customers effectively, and avoid wasting their time with let’s say tech products when their only interest is in beauty products.

In conclusion, email marketing is a highly effective tool that when used correctly can not only nurture your current customer base, but also grow it to unprecedented levels. All you need is a simple email marketing service, knowledge of your customers, creativity, and the drive to build out these segmentation strategies.

Here are a few email marketing services we recommend:

• Mailchimp
• Klaviyo
• Campaign Monitor

Contact us to learn how we can help your business with email marketing strategies!