How to Get Started with Email Segmentation?

Introduction

Email segmentation is a way to personalize your campaigns so that they’re more relevant for the people who receive them. It’s about sending the right message to the right person at the right time.

What is email segmentation?

Email segmentation is a way to organize your email list into groups of people who have similar interests, behaviors, or demographics. You can then use these segments as the basis for sending targeted emails to specific groups.

Segmentation is based on two types of data:

Self-reported (customer-provided) information like age, gender, and location. This type of data is gathered when you collect contact information at the point of sale or registration. When someone signs up for your mailing list using an online form, they usually provide some kind of demographic information about themselves as part of that process.
Behavior-based (automated/detected) data such as purchase history, page visits or browser type. This type of data can be easily collected by companies that have access to customer loyalty programs and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems such as Salesforce or Hubspot CRM.

What is the value of email segmentation?

If the people who receive your emails don’t like them, they won’t read them. And if they don’t read your emails, you can’t educate them about what you do and why they should care.

Email segmentation helps you increase open rates by sending more relevant emails to the right people at the right time. It also helps you retain customers by showing them that you’re paying attention to their behaviors, interests, and preferences.

How is email segmentation different from personalization?

As we’ve said, email segmentation is not to be confused with personalization. Personalization refers to any time you send a message that is customized based on the recipient’s individual characteristics. Email segmentation, on the other hand, uses groups of people who share similar characteristics—like their interests or purchase history—as its basis for separation.

It may be helpful to think of it this way: Personalization is like talking directly to one person while email segmenting is like talking in front of a large audience (a lecture). Both are ways of communicating with your customers but they have different objectives and work towards them in different ways.”

What are common types of email segmentation?

There are a number of different types of segmentation that you can use in your email marketing campaigns:

Demographic segmentation (age, gender, location)
Behavioral segmentation (number of purchases, time between purchases)
Contextual segmentation (device type, time of day)
Gated content

How do you create customer segments?

To begin segmenting your audience, the first thing you need to do is decide which groups of customers you want to track. These groups are called segments. Segments can be based on different factors, like location or purchase history; they can also be created as a manual grouping by a store manager or by a series of questions answered by an individual customer in your email marketing platform. The more information that goes into creating these segments, the better! Measuring how successful each segment has been over time will help you understand which types work best for your business and how best to optimize them moving forward.

When it comes time to actually set up these segments within your email marketing platform, there are two main ways: automatic or manual segmentation. Automatic segmentation happens when an algorithm automatically puts people into specific categories based on their actions—for example, if someone purchases from one category but not another during their lifetime with the store (or even just once), then that user will likely be associated with one group rather than another regardless of any other factors that may affect their behavior and purchasing habits over time (e.g., location).

Where should you start with email segmentation?

There are numerous ways to segment your customers, but it’s important to start with the right ones. The most obvious place to start is the customers who have been most loyal to your brand. Sure, they may be less active in terms of purchases or engagement than other customer segments, but they’ve also been with you for years and have proven that they’ll stick with you through thick and thin.

Since these loyal customers are already familiar with your brand, they’re more likely than other segments of users to respond favorably when given special offers or discounts exclusively targeted at them. You’ll want to make sure that these offers don’t cannibalize sales from other groups—after all, if a customer buys an item at half price from one segment and then gets another deal on it later in their journey as part of another segmentation strategy (like “last chance” offers), how does this affect customer lifetime value?

How do you apply customer segments to your email marketing campaigns?

Now that you understand why and how to use customer segmentation to send more relevant content to your customers, it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty of applying it.

There are two main ways that you can use email segmentation:

To create an individualized campaign for each customer (for example, if a new customer signs up through an ad or a website form, they receive a welcome email with links based on their career interests; after working with them for six months and understanding their needs better, we send them core content about our products).
To create individualized versions of existing campaigns that boost engagement by targeting segments differently (for example, if I want to improve open rates for my weekly newsletter across all segments by 20%, I could run A/B tests with different subject lines or from addresses).

How can you measure the results of your segmented email campaigns?

It’s important to measure the results of your email campaigns, including segmented ones. Some marketers only consider open rates when measuring the success of their emails, but an open rate is just one metric to use. You should also look at click-through and unsubscribe rates to see if they improve over time.

Looking at these metrics over time can help you determine whether or not it’s working better than a traditional campaign: if you notice that your open rate improves after implementing segmentation, then it was likely worth it! If you don’t see any significant changes in these metrics by segmenting your lists, though—or if they’re getting worse—you might want to try another strategy (like A/B split testing).

You can also use these numbers as benchmarks for each specific group; this will help show which segments are performing well or poorly and allow you to focus on improving those areas where there’s room for growth!

Email segmentation helps make your campaigns more relevant and improves open and response rates.

It will:

Help you understand your customers better, which is essential for improving the success of marketing efforts.
Increase customer loyalty by helping you offer them what they want when they want it.
Improve click-through rates by offering content that’s tailored to individual interests or needs (like a particular product).

Conclusion

After reading this post, you should have a good understanding of how email segmentation works, how to get started with it and where to go next. If you’re looking for more information on how to approach segmentation and personalization in general, we recommend taking a look at our blog post on the topic.