If you are a marketer, by now you’ve probably found out that segmentation is the holy grail of email marketing. Once I implemented email marketing segmentation for one of my clients, who had virtually no segmentation, I knew why. According to Kissmetrics, segmented email campaigns get 14.64% more opens and 59.99% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns.
5 Email Marketing Segmentation Strategies To Try
Segment by Engagement
In my opinion, segmenting by engagement is the most important segmentation technique. Why? Because sending to people, who have not been opening your emails really hurts your deliverability. A LOT!
What does deliverability mean? Well, since you’ve found this blog post I hope you know but in a nutshell, it’s a metric that describes how likely it is for your email to land in the inbox folder and not the spam folder of your recipient and thus, the likelihood of someone actually opening your email.
Segment by Geographic Location
Segmenting by geographic location may be more useful to some businesses, while not useful to other businesses. For my client, we would use these segments to announce special events (pop-up stores, parties, etc.) happening in our subscribers’ respective cities. However, you can also utilize geographic location segmentation without running location-specific events for personalization purposes. Personalization is one of the big current trends in email marketing. So, if you’re sending to your customers in NY and they are having rainy weather, why not personalize your email based on that (e.g. Umbrellas to weather the current storm)? Or if you want to send to your subscribers in Los Angeles and there is a huge LA event coming up, for example, Coachella (when all of LA becomes a ghost town), personalize your email in that way.
Segment by Purchase Behavior
A very easy way to segment your email list is by purchase behavior, i.e. subscribers, who have already purchased and subscribers, who haven’t purchased yet.
For people, who have purchased you know they already trust your brand and you can assume that it will be easier to sell to them. They are also great leads for cross- or up-selling.
With new leads, however, you need to first establish trust in your business and brand. A more content-based approach will work better for them and you can build rapport by sending them stories about happy customers, product reviews, brand mentions in the press or other content to create trust.
Position in the Sales Funnel
As fancy as this segmentation strategy may sound it is actually one of the easiest and one of the most effective. Customers should not be treated the same way depending on their position in the sales funnel. New subscribers, at the top of the funnel, are just getting to know your brand and should be targeted with a more general welcome series that introduces them to the brand, the product offerings and builds trust. Subscribers that have been receiving your emails for a period of time already should be further targeted by analyzing which emails they engage with the most (e.g. by clicking on the email). This information can help you tailor your next emails showcasing the products they were interested in.
Conclusion
Email marketing segmentation is one of the most important tactics in your marketing strategy. It will win your business some big bucks and is still the best way for an e-commerce business to stay in touch with its customers (besides social media maybe?!). A little bit of creativity and some email marketing automation (more on that later) and you can start increasing your email ROI by lengths.
Personalization 