Did you know... segmenting your email marketing can increase your open rates by 203% according to Hubspot?
Mass email marketing campaigns don't work anymore. Now, to get results, you need to reach the right people at the right time. To achieve this, you must leverage email marketing segmentation wisely.
Email marketing segmentation is all about categorizing email contacts into different groups based on predefined criteria. This way, people who share similar characteristics are placed in the same group.
Email marketing segmentation facilitates personalizing campaigns and ensures that all messages are relevant to each subscriber. Because emails resonate better with subscribers' pain points, wants, and needs, the engagement rate improves and you’re able to increase open, click-through, and conversion rates.
There are many different types of segmentation criteria depending on the type of company and the customer profile you are targeting. For example, you can segment your list according to:
Before carrying out any email marketing activities, it’s important to make sure that you have a high-quality database. Over time, it’s normal to have outdated contacts, invalid data, or even people who never want to receive your emails.
To clean up your database, you first need to remove contacts who are inactive. Delete email addresses that have hard bounced, make it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe, and identify inactive or low-quality contacts. Once this is done, organize the remaining contacts and eliminate possible duplicates.
In order to have good segmentation in email marketing, you have to know precisely who you are targeting. If you haven't already done so, it's time to define your buyer persona. Your buyer persona is your ideal customer. Therefore, the contacts in your database that are closest to your buyer persona will be the ones most likely to convert.
Keep in mind that the behaviors and needs of your buyer persona may evolve over time, and it’s also possible that new user profiles may emerge. Therefore, your buyer persona should be updated periodically.
Email marketing is a very flexible tool that adapts to all types of brands, budgets, and needs. But to use it with precision, it’s necessary to determine what you want to achieve. In order to properly segment your campaign, you should ask yourselves what you want to achieve with it: content downloads, product purchases, loyalty, etc.
With your objective in mind, you can decide which users should receive your campaigns and think about what type of content to use to attract them.
Each of your contacts requires different messages and segmentation strategies as they progress through the buying process.
There are many ways to classify users according to the stage of the buying process they are in. One of the most popular ways is based on the temperature of the lead:
To simplify the entire email marketing segmentation process, you can use different methodologies that automate the process:
From time to time, you should stop to analyze what is happening with your email marketing according to the objectives you have previously defined. Are you managing to improve your open, click, download, or conversion rates? Which lists are working best? Use the findings to refine your segmentation criteria and make your email marketing more effective than ever.