Segmenting Your Marketing Campaigns to Boost Profits

What is Segmentation?

In marketing, email segmentation is the process of dividing a list of email subscribers into smaller grouped units based on established criteria. These criteria distinguish each subscriber from others, giving you a profile of each subscriber's demographics and interests. Through this division, you can develop personalized, relevant content for each segmented type.

Segmentation is the foundation of all effective email campaign strategies. Experienced marketing strategists realize the value of segmentation and its profitability.

• According to the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), segmentation can bring a 760% return growth.
• Research firm eMarketer found that 39% of marketers that use list segmentation improve their email open rates while 24% have better sales leads.
• Per marketing research company Chadwick Martin Bailey, 56% of those unsubscribing from lists do so after feeling the email content is no longer relevant.

A good percentage of marketers only perform the preliminaries of subscriber segmentation, such as age and gender demographics. Though helpful, a more effective way is by making a more detailed segmentation.

Segmenting Your Subscribers

There are unique methods you can use in segmenting your subscriber list. In addition, you can combine an array of criteria into segments for a more powerful, detailed segmentation. These are some ways you can categorize your segments to understand subscriber habits and give them more effective communications:

Age

This most-used segmentation helps to focus on particular personas, basing your content on shared traits.

Gender

Segmenting by gender is ideal for brands selling merchandise. If your products are in gender-specific groups, your email content should be segmented by gender as well. However, also see that you have all the right background information. Such as customers who buy gifts for those of opposite genders. By tracking customer interaction over a period of time, you can see if there's a pattern of lack of engagement with your gender-targeted emails. If so, you can use a segmented email to request them to update their profile preference information.

Locality

Grouping your subscribers by locality is an excellent way to segment event-driven emails.  This grouping can be by city, county, state, zip code, or the locality divisions specific to non-US countries. Combine location-defined segments with effective content to give subscribers location-specific information for an event, which will save you time by emailing them through just one campaign.

Birthdays/Anniversaries

People enjoy emails that celebrate their birthday with special offers. The gift of a mere coupon or other offerings can boost your click rates 179% higher than other promotional email campaigns. Besides this increase in click rates, Experian discovered that birthday-themed emails bring a 342% greater profit versus promotional emails. If you heavily base your sales on special occasions, celebrating your customers' account registration anniversary is another ideal way to show your thoughtfulness-besides boosting subscriber interaction and profit!

Last Purchase or Log-in Date

Grouping your list members by the date of their most recent purchase is a great way to generate repeat customers. If their last order was a recent one, as a reward, give them a discount coupon or offer an item similar to their most current purchase. For purchases made several months ago, send them offers in a series to entice them to return.

Response Results

This term alludes to how a recipient engages with an email. Information from response results can be used in various ways. One way is by sending follow-up reminders to those who opened your last campaign message. For subscribers who didn't open their email, resend your campaign message using another title for the subject line, which may result in a 10% to 40% greater open rate. When emailing newsletters with a range of content, don't forget to document these results in order to send your subscribers more of the popular material.

Developing list segments founded on response results may also result in two kinds of segments: those with highest engagement and those with least engagement. Both groups represent subscribers and customers who are usually missed and little-used when it comes to segments. It's optimal when your audience is highly engaged but exasperating when they are unresponsive and indifferent. Still, numerous email marketers neglect those segments due to hesitance to spoil what seems like a good list or reluctance to give up subscribers on their list. The following will detail and give examples of ways to connect with these segments and others.

Applying Segmentation

The method of segmenting might sound good, but acting on it brings other types of challenges. Yet, what is the value of having a strategy if you have no way to perform it? Here are some examples for creating and sending campaigns that become vibrant upon being coupled with your target segments.

Send Origin-Based Welcome Emails

Welcome emails shouldn't be novel to any marketer. However, many email marketers, if not most, compose generic emails to welcome their new subscribers. While sending generic emails is better than sending none, there are brilliant methods to apply segmentation to advance your welcome email or your series of welcome emails.

Gender

Segmenting by gender is ideal for brands selling merchandise. If your products are in gender-specific groups, your email content should be segmented by gender as well. However, also see that you have all the right background information. Such as customers who buy gifts for those of opposite genders. By tracking customer interaction over a period of time, you can see if there's a pattern of lack of engagement with your gender-targeted emails. If so, you can use a segmented email to request them to update their profile preference information.

Subscriber Signup Method

Creating a series of welcome emails that derives from the manner of subscriber opt-in signups can nurture additional senses of warmth and significance. This makes an easy method to do email personalization due to the likelihood of few channels for your subscriber signups. The first of three steps for developing an origin-based welcome email series begins with identifying all plausible channels for your subscriber signup. Once you pinpoint these channels, use custom fields to label these subscribers by their signup method in your email marketing database.  Then, configure an automated series of emails for welcoming them.

Rekindle Inactive and Silent Subscriber Engagement

It's not uncommon for a section of subscribers to be inactive, not engaged, or have no interaction at all with your email campaigns. This can stem from various reasons. They may no longer have interest in your content. They may feel your brand doesn't value them enough or that your brand no longer fills their needs. They may find your emails nonrelevant, not personalized, or something they didn't opt-in to receive in the first place. No matter the reason, a campaign is necessary to reengage them, whether to win them back or give them the choice to opt-out of all your communications.

Access the Most Potential from Highly-Engaged Subscribers

Your subscribers who open virtually every email you send and have a high number of click-throughs are likely your greatest supporters. So it's time to plan how to take this subscriber group's engagement to an even higher level. You can accomplish this through various methods and compelling content, such as giving them VIP status with loyalty perks; inviting them to leave reviews, feedback, or survey responses; or offering them to participate in a referral program.

Conclusion

Through segmenting your subscriber list, you can bring potential empowerment to your brand, detailing and personalizing your list in almost limitless ways. Taking a wise approach to segmentation can result in successful campaigns, whether you're welcoming new subscribers or attempting to win back older subscribers. By putting these suggestions into practice, you can keep your subscribers engaged with more personalized content.