Many companies, big and small, understand the need to connect with their customers through email. It’s an easy way to stay engaged with people who have shown interest in your company. Yet, 70% of companies are missing a key component of email marketing, and it’s costing them their clickthrough rate.
Email list segmentation allows companies to take their email marketing campaigns a step further by creating highly targeted emails for specific “segments” of their lists with commonalities.
Mailchimp’s latest user data showed that segmented campaigns get 14.37% more opens and 64.78% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns!
To help you take advantage of your hard-earned subscribers, here are four ways to segment your subscribers so you can gain opens, clicks and sales.
1. By Demographic
Segmenting your list by demographic can be very helpful based on the kind of product you are selling. Age, gender, and occupation are only a few examples of the demographics you can look at when targeting specific consumers.
Creating smaller groups of people with similar interests, backgrounds, or even pain points will allow you to dive deeper into each niche. You will be able to share products and services ideal for that demographic, or even reframe the same product in different ways depending on who you are appealing to.
For example, if you segment your subscribers by income, you can then send emails promoting relevant products to each income level. Your top tier product or service would be best to promote to individuals with higher incomes while discounts and lower-priced products are going to appeal to individuals with lower incomes.
The drawback of this method is that you would need to get information from people when they first sign up. Not only does it take more time for them to give you their information- which they may not want to do- but some people may not feel comfortable sharing this information at all. Your best bet is to leave these fields available as an option, but do not make them required for sign-up.
2. By Clickthrough and Open Rate
Open rate and clickthrough rate are two of the most important metrics to look at when tracking your email marketing success. Your open rate measures the percentage of people who opened your email while your clickthrough rate is the percentage of people who clicked on any of the links in your email.
This method allows you to engage users who have become inactive by creating an email to draw their attention back in or target users who have clicked certain products and announcements to gain conversions. You can also reward highly engaged subscribers with exclusive announcements, deals, or programs.
3. By Region
Geographic segmentation is when you segment your customers by region. This could be as broad as country or state, or as specific as a city or county. How you decide to break up your lists is dependent on your area of service and whether or not you are an international or local company.
This is beneficial for several reasons. You’ll be able to schedule emails for optimized times for each time zone. If your company or organization does tours or travels frequently, it can be a great way to connect with targeted subscribers in that area. You can even personalize readers’ experience with relevant directions, shipping information, and more.
4. By Area Of Interest
Consider where you caught the attention of this subscriber. Are they a general subscriber from your website’s automated pop-up, or did you meet them in-person at an event?
Understanding why a subscriber is on your list can be crucial to understanding what they expect to gain from your newsletter. Creating segments for people’s particular area of interest is a great way to keep them engaged and moving towards a purchase.
Examples of such segments can range from workshop attendees to volunteer lists. At the end of the day, giving your readers relevant information is what is going to keep them engaged, subscribed and loyal to your company.
Breaking your lists down into segments is possible through a number of ways, depending on which email marketing program you use and how many subscribers you have.
Need help? Contact our marketing experts to optimize your email list!
