5 Best Practices for Email List Segmentation
Reading Time: ~5 Mins | Written By: Juliana Bermudez
Email list segmentation allows you to craft tailored messages to your audience members, enhance customer engagement, and drive higher conversion rates. By leveraging the power of email list segmentation, you can unlock the potential of your email marketing campaigns and achieve even better results than sending all your communications to your whole audience.
Audience segmentation is a perfect tool for identifying subgroups within your audience to deliver more tailored messaging and build stronger connections. The subgroups can be based on demographics such as location, gender, age, ethnicity, income, or level of education. Subgroups can also be based on behaviour, such as purchasing history.
Segmentation is also a great way to make a customer feel like a message was written just for them. With this tactic, they’re more likely to be receptive to what you have to say. Segmentation makes that kind of personalization possible.
In this blog post, we will dive into the five best practices to help you optimize your email segmentation efforts. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting with email campaigns, these best practices will equip you with the knowledge and techniques to deliver relevant, personalized content to your subscribers and maximize the impact of your email marketing efforts.
Tip #1: Segmentation is not one-size fits all
Commonly used segmentations range from demographics, behaviour, and where you are in the buyer’s journey. What strategy you use to segment your audience depends on the product or service you’re offering.
For example, if you have a website that sells surfing equipment, it might not make sense to only treat people in different geographical locations as separate segments, because most of them probably have to travel to go surfing. But it might be practical to segment them according to their behaviour and level of engagement. People who have been interested in the sport for years and know the products you sell will probably engage with your business differently than those just starting.
The main types of audience segmentation are demographics, behaviour, interests, buyers' journey progress, level of engagement, and device usage. Do your research on your audience and ensure you’re picking the right one to work for you and your business effectively!
Tip #2: Don’t segment too narrowly
Keep in mind that it is possible to segment your audience too far. If your audience is defined to the point that barely contains anyone, then it’s going to be an issue. You’ll either reach too few people, or you’ll end up spending time and energy writing messages for too many different audiences.
Keep the groups you focus on broad enough to encompass a relatively wide amount of your customer base. Instead of “middle-aged customers that buy at Halloween, pay with a Visa card, and live in Alberta,” try defining your audience as “Canadian customers that make more purchases during the fall.” The latter audience segment allows for much more room for success.
Tip #3: Set goals and keep tabs
It is pretty basic knowledge at this point that setting marketing goals is vital, as well as ensuring these goals also align with the overall goals of your business. If your goal is to “reach more people,” for example, specify what you’d want to see from your segments. That can include getting 500 new subscribers to your email newsletter, increasing the amount of traffic to your website, or doubling your email campaign’s click-through rate.
If you’ve met your goals with your segments, perfect. If you haven’t, then you will need to make some changes. Setting goals and measuring them is easy and can provide valuable insights into how your marketing plan is performing overall.
Tip #4: Stay organized
The amount of data you’re working with can start to seem overwhelming, especially if you're working with a large audience. You might not know where to begin, but there is a way to keep everything clean and organized so you know where you have segments and how those segments are performing without being overwhelmed with information.
Rather than creating multiple audience lists for your segments, try using a single primary list and then build segments within it using tags so you can manage it easily.
Tip #5: Utilize the data you already have
Do you have a relatively detailed audience already in your email management platform? Have you sent out emails to your audience previously? Then you have a few segments to work with already!
You can use the data from both your audience and previous campaign performance to create simple segments to get you started. A few examples of these segments are:
Top locations - Create segments of your contacts based on where they’re located. This is useful, for example, if you’re sharing information relating to a certain city you need to target, or you're opening a new shop in a certain location you’d like to boost awareness for.
Email engagement - Once you’ve sent out a few emails, you can view and target segments of your audience based on whether they engage with your campaigns ‘often,’ ‘sometimes’ or ‘rarely.’ For example, if you have certain subscribers who engage quite often, you could reward them with a discount code as a thank-you for their loyalty.
Sources of recent growth - Have a look at the overview of where new audience members are subscribing from. For example, you might view a segment of recent signups that came in through via a recent purchase, and try sending them a campaign with suggestions for what they could buy next, or ask them to review the purchase.
Effective email list segmentation is the key to unlocking the full potential of your email marketing campaigns. By implementing the five best practices we've outlined, you can harness the power of segmentation to engage your subscribers, deliver personalized content, and drive significant results for your business.
Interested in becoming an email marketing pro and learning more about email marketing strategies? Check out the Email Marketing Module as part of our Digital Marketing Bootcamp.
