Mastering Email marketing, Lesson 3: Audience Segmentation

 

All your email subscribers are different. Some are familiar with your brand/products and some are new. Some signed up to your email list for your product, others for the free eBook. Some love your emails, some are about to unsubscribe.

The consequence of this is that there is no “perfect” email you can send to your entire email list. The best way to communicate with each group of subscribers is different.

This is where segmentation comes in. Instead of “batch and blasting” your entire email list with one-size-fits-all content, you split your list into “cohorts” and send tailored content to match their needs.

You’re giving each subscriber what they want, when they want it. The result is increased engagement, sending reputation, and revenue.

There’s also a 2nd order benefit of segmentation. A better subscriber experience results in a greater % of emails being clicked and opened. Both are considered “positive actions” by mail providers and the result is improved deliverability.

So, not only are your emails better tailored to each subscriber, but also a greater % of them are landing in primary inboxes!

A quick look into segmentation

The first step is having a clear segmentation goal in mind:

• Do you want to sell more products?

• Do you want to deliver tailor-made experiences?

• Do you want to increase engagement and improve deliverability?

Once you’ve answered that question you can look at setting up segments to help you achieve your goal. And this requires the collection of actionable data.

For example, if you want to segment male and female users, it’s essential that you know where you are gathering that data from. A lot of ESP’s help handle this, but in more technical cases you may need to add some tags to be collected inside the ESP.

In some more complex cases tracking tags may be necessary or even a CRM like Hubspot or Salesforce.

Segmentation in action

We’ve covered the benefits of segmentation and the importance of data collection. Now let’s get into some real-world situations of when it might make sense to segment:

1) Based on demographic

Imagine you own a clothing brand. You’d want to segment by gender and create both a male and female cohort. Any female clothing offers would be sent exclusively to women. Any male clothing offers are sent exclusively to men. Simple!

2) Based on engagement

One use case is to re-engage inactive subscribers. Here’s a nice example from Duolingo: This is of course only sent to highly inactive people on their list . They must be segmenting based on when someone last used the app.

3) Based on website behaviors

How a subscriber interacts with your website is very revealing and there’s often an opportunity to create segments based on these sorts of behaviors.

One classic example is creating a segment for those who “abandoned cart” and sending them reminder emails of their progress.

So there we go:

1) Set up your segmentation goals

2) Collect actionable data and create your segments

3) Tailor emails to match your segment’s needs

And the result is better engagement, user experience, and deliverability.

That’s everything for this lesson. If you want to read more on segmentation, you can download our detailed guide.

We’ll be back tomorrow where we look at the anatomy of a high performing email.