Working smarter instead of harder is a core tenant of the team here at SmartMail’s approach to email marketing. Email list segmentation is one of many ways in which we work to improve the effectiveness of your ecommerce marketing campaigns.
Using email segmentation can help you send more targeted and increasingly relevant messages to individual groups of customers, subscribers, and leads.
Why is this important? Because the more targeted your email, ultimately, the higher your core success metrics will be, including:
– Email open rates
– Click-Through-Rates
– Conversions
– Return on investment
– Revenue and sales
In this article, we’ll guide you towards using email segments to their utmost potential to ensure your email marketing is hard hitting but with a soft, deft marketing touch.
Email List Segmentation
Email segmentation refers to the practice of dividing your email mailing list into smaller groups based on specific criteria. By doing so, you can ensure your email content is more personalized, targeted, and effective for the group in question.
Criteria used for segmenting can vary depending on your particular needs and marketing objectives. Common factors used to divide email segments include demographics, interests, past purchases, and online behavior.
This email from Your Logo is a good example of an email sent exclusively to potential customers who have exhibited a particular behavior on their website: Specifically, adding a product/service to their online cart without completing the purchase itself.
The more you understand your target audience for your marketing email, the better you can tailor every aspect of the messaging to solve their pain points and connect with their needs.
The more customized your email marketing, the more likely your email will convert to a sale, subscription or other Call-To-Action.
Moreover, even customers who do not complete the intended action, will still benefit from higher engagement with your brand and a stronger long-term relationship with your business.
How to use Email Segmentation to its Greatest Potential
1. Collect, Analyze and Use Relevant Data
Knowledge is power when it comes to email marketing segments. The more information you have about your customer’s or would-be customers’ preferences, interests, online behavior, and past purchases the better positioned you’ll be to target future emails.
The more data the better. By analyzing and determining what the data collected means, your choice of email list segmentation will be more informed and future marketing messages more considered.
Collecting data is often easier than you think: Make sure to speak to our team today to find out more.
2. Determine Your Objective
Your marketing campaign should be based and built around an objective. It might be to raise awareness about a new pop-up store in a specific area. It could be to promote a new product range in time for the new season, such as the email campaign below from Minna.
Or it could be to just drive up sales.
Regardless, your email segmentation choices should reflect and complement the objectives you’re trying to achieve.
3. Segment Your Email List Accordingly
Segmenting Email Lists Based on Behavior
Your email list will likely be made up of a range of individuals. Some will have already made a purchase from your ecommerce platform, others merely added items to their cart and left, while some may just have signed up for your newsletter and never even visited your store.
Segmenting email lists based on which category of behavior is relevant allows you to target your marketing specifically to encourage the right Call-To-Action.
The below email from Casper, for example, introduces a new product and does not need to be targeted directly to a past customer or someone who has abandoned a cart.
Whereas the following email marketing example from Canva would clearly be better suited to someone who has registered an account for the free version of the program, with the Call-To-Action being to sign up for the paid Pro version.
Segmenting Email Lists Based on Demographics
Email segmentation based on demographics can be equally effective. Tailoring your overall message to resonate better with a particular group or type of people can help improve your conversion rate and increase sales.
There are a wide range of demographic attributes that you might want to consider targeting in your email segments depending on the product, service, and industry you’re operating in.
Consider using:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Income level
- Education level
- Marital status
- Family status
- Family size
- Occupation
- Hobbies/interests
The below email from Matalan is clearly better targeted towards a segment of one’s subscribers that have a family with children of school uniform-wearing age. Sending out this email to the wrong demographic will decrease your conversion rate at best and actively turn potential customers away at worse.
This email from MailChimp, on the other hand, can be targeted to an audience of a range of genders, ages (though probably just adults) and location. But the email segmentation relevant here is online interests and occupations. Sole traders, entrepreneurs and people interested in blogging may be some of the hobbies or jobs that would be best suited to such a campaign.
Even socio-economic factors can be relevant, as people working on a tight or no budget would be most interested in a free .com website and unlikely to be in a position to hire a professional web developer.
4. Avoid Over-segmentation
Email segmentation is highly effective when done right, but too much of a good thing can be bad. Over-segmentation can lead to overly complicated campaigns, a higher frequency of errors, and lower hit rates with conversions and engagement.
It is best practice to start with a few email marketing segments, and gradually add more as and when needed over time.
5. Continuously Refine
Continuing to adjust and maintain your email segmentation is critical to ensure ongoing success. Keeping your email lists clean by removing inactive subscribers or contacts who have chosen to unsubscribe or ‘disengage’.
This will not only improve the overall success of your email but also allow you to better utilize finite marketing resources.
SmartMail: Your partner in effective email segmentation
Email list segmentation can be a godsend when done correctly, but the devil is often in the details.
Fortunately, our ecommerce email experts at SmartMail are here to help! Why not start off with a free email audit courtesy of our team? That way you’ll be able to find out how we can help you segment your email list and send out more effective, better marketing campaigns.
