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If you want to get a higher open and click-through rate for your email marketing campaign, you need to segment your email list. In this blog, we shall discuss some of the email segmentation strategies you need to know. Keep reading!

Email segmentation is the process of dividing your email marketing subscribers into different groups. These groups are formed based on predefined exclusive principles. Segmentation is an email marketing strategy where you send an email campaign to a selected and segmented list to get the desired results.

Table of Contents

  1. What is email segmentation: explanation?
  2. Importance of email segmentation
  3. Email segmentation best strategies
    • Segmentation by demographics
    • Segmentation by geography
    • Segmentation by psychographic traits
    • Segmentation by engagement
    • Segmentation by purchase history
    • Segmentation by cart abandonment
    • Segmentation by inactive users
  4. Conclusion

Undoubtedly, email is one of the primary methods of communication in businesses. Therefore, when a marketer plans to design an email campaign, he ensures that it delivers to the right audience at the right time. Email marketing segmentation helps you a lot in this process to make you feel relaxed in terms of calculating success rate.

If you keep an eye on the modes of marketing and communication, you will realize that email is still not only alive but it is leading the market over the last several years. Being a marketer, you may realize the fact that every user has different tendencies, likes, interests, dislikes, and preferences. Sending the same email marketing campaign to all without any discrimination can be so much harmful in one way or another.

If you will keep sending these unspecified emails to all the lists, you will see that the subscribers will start unsubscribing from your email list which could be worrisome in a long run. So, how to curb this menace? All you need is to segment your email list so that your message may reach the right people for better engagement.

What Is Email Segmentation: Explanation?

We have elaborated finely on the email list segmentation in the above lines. To add on, it is a technique where we prioritize and categorize the email subscribers or contacts in various groups subsequent to a criterion. This is the most cherished way to share your message to the characters who possess the same qualities and preferences.

You can segment your list based on:

  • Inclinations
  • Purchase History
  • Geographic location
  • Interests
  • Likes & dislikes
  • Profession & occupation
  • Age group
  • …and whatever you want

This practice will make you a sense and confidence that every email contact is important it counts while sending an email campaign. According to the studies, the email campaigns that we send to the specific list bring more than 90% higher click-through rate contrary to the other lists that you do not segment.

Email segmentation might be a beginner’s technique, but many email marketers do not pay attention to it; resultantly, they do not harvest the desired results. Think for a second that a subscriber shares his email address with you for email newsletters purposes, and you do not get the full potential of it if you don’t segment it. If so, you need to think twice before considering yourself an email marketer.

Importance of Email Segmentation

Studies show that more than 245 billion emails are being received and sent every day. Among these emails, around 127 billion emails are sent for business tenacities. This is a huge number that no email marketer can ignore. Hence, an email campaign that you send to subscribers tells its future based on segmentation.

importance of email segmentation

It means that if you send an email to the audience without segmentation, there are a lot of chances that many uninterested users will delete it without even opening it up. On the other hand, if you send your campaign to the selected people, it will give you wonderful results in terms of open and click-through rates.

There are many other benefits that you can harvest when you send an email campaign to a segmented list, some of them include:

Email Segmentation Best Strategies

Email marketers are fully aware of the importance of email list segmentation; if not, they need to revisit their status. We know that if you send an email campaign to a predefined list, you will get some decent engagement.

Market experts are of the view that if you send your email campaign to the list that you have already segmented, this list will get more than 14% open rate and around 65% more clicks straightaway. While looking at these figures, we can easily figure out the advantages that we can take from an email segmented list.

Here are some email segmentation strategies if you are looking to send you to want to start it now:

Segmentation by Demographics

Getting the demographic characteristics of the user is the first step toward list segmentation. These characteristics might include gender, age, location, profession, hobbies, and other important information. There are great chances that your users will not disclose all this in one go. You also need to be so precise and ask for the information from the user that is compatible with your business.

If you will ask for a load of information, there are many chances that the users will not disclose the most relevant information also. For example, if you sell cloth online, what information will be more beneficial for your business to have? If you think deeply on this point, you will come to the conclusion that knowing the age of your users will be the most desirable information in this regard.

Knowing the age factor of your audience will let you know to send the right information and sale offers to the right person at the right time. For that purpose, you can send a welcome email to the new subscribers who can fill out a simple form regarding the information you required.

Segmentation by Geography

segmentation by geography

The culture and norms of the people living in one place vary from the people living somewhere else. Likewise, the weather and climate also add some serious differences in one way or another. If you are running a brand and it is already expanded well within and outside the border, you need to be aware of the customers’ geography.

In this technique, you can identify your customers on the bases of their location i.e., postal code, city, country, region, continent, etc. By knowing this information, you will see that your email marketing campaign performs well. These predefined factors will make you understand the interests and preferences of the people living in that particular area.

Let us understand this factor with an example again. For example, you are running a cloth brand and want to send an email campaign where you want to disclose the sales and promotions. Can you send this one email campaign to the two different people where one lives in a hot climate and the other in the cold? This will not be a good move at all.

Segmentation by Psychographic Traits

As we have discussed above that the people living in different regions possess different traits, and the same is the case with the psychographic factors. When we go shopping, we see that one thing that we reject may be highly appreciable by the other customers and vice versa. This is because the lifestyle and personalities of two persons may vary to a larger extent.

Therefore, you can segment your users based on values, hobbies, lifestyles, personalities, and more. When we see these qualities and characteristics, we see that these are not easy to identify in every person. If you want to cope with this, you need to do some extra homework to collect this data.

For that reason, you can create a small form with the checkboxes, where you request the users to tell something about their hobbies and interests. Following this, you will be able to get some data that will be suitable for your email marketing campaign. The emails that you send based on the preferences of the users get higher open and click-through rates.

Segmentation by Engagement

The level of engagement is always different for the users in every email campaign. This factor gives you enough understanding to enhance your campaign’s success. Email segmentation based on engagement gives you the best results for the upcoming email marketing campaigns. If you want to notice the engagement of your audience, you need to use an email automation tool like Mumara where you can keep an eye on the metrics.

Via these email stats and metrics, you will easily get to know which user is taking more interest in your emails. Through this dynamic, you can create a segment of your contacts that are more interested to hear from you. Not only by the email campaign, but you can also gauge the interest of the user by keeping an eye on the web page visits performed by him.

For example, if the user is visiting the same page over and over again, it means that he is interested in that particular product. There are more chances to covert this lead to sale as compared to the one who is visiting the product page once in a blue moon.

Segmentation by Purchase History

segmentation purchase history

Segmentation based on purchase history is also one of the best ways to optimize the targets. You can send emails to take the reviews of the products that they have previously purchased. You can create a segment based on the reviews. For example, if they give a positive review, it means that they will try your product the next time.

Likewise, when you will send them an email campaign, they will immediately open it up to get to know what is new for them. On the flip side, if they give a negative review, you can calm them down by offering a replacement. By doing so, they will repose their interest in your brand and it will ultimately increase the engagement of your email marketing campaign.

If they do not show any further interest, you need to be aware of sending them the emails because there are many chances that they will not pay any heed to your message whether it is an SMS campaign or email campaign.

Segmentation by Cart Abandonment

According to an estimate, 67% of the E-commerce store visitors leave the cart abandoned. This is a huge number and worrisome situation. All you need to re-engage these customers to boost your sales to a larger extent. A segment for these people can be created and sent reminder emails with a call to action where they may redirect to the page where they left their abandoned cart.

This email will give a sense of responsibility to the user and they will find that the email is specially relayed to them. According to the marketers, all the users do not leave the abandoned cart due to money problems. Some of them face difficulties in terms of the checkout process and payment methods. You can approach these customers and discuss with them the actual issue.

By doing so the user will tell the actual problem that he faces while making a purchase from your platform. This method helps you understand the reason why people are leaving abandoned carts. It will help you a lot in rectifying the actual issues in the interface and other problems a user faces.

Segmentation by Inactive Customers

inactive email users

Email segmentation based on inactive users is much beneficial for your next email marketing campaign. This segmentation can be based on two aspects. On one hand, you can make a list of the users who have not made any purchases for long. On the other hand, you can create a segment on the users who are inactive when you send an email campaign.

You can re-engage these contacts simply by sending them personalized emails. Also, there might be an issue with the call to action (CTA) that you mentioned in your email. So, create segments and engage with your inactive users to boost your sales.

Conclusion

To conclude in a nutshell, we say that email segmentation increases the engagement of your campaigns on one hand and reduces the unsubscribe rate on the other. Not only this, by this method you can build a rock-hard relationship with your audience in the most positive manner. It means that when you will design a campaign, you will be knowing it beforehand whom this campaign is concerned.

In this way, you can send the campaign to the right list and get the relevant results. Last but not least, you need to use an email automation tool that will help you to check the engagement and you will easily perform email segmentation.  

Eric Lee

A reader, writer, researcher, and explorer!

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