What is email segmentation?

Email segmentation is a marketing strategy used to sort your email list subscribers into different categories so you can target them with specific types of email communication.

Examples of the criteria used for email segmentation include demographics, geographics, behaviours and preferences. This is determined by the data your business collates on every customer.

When your audience is split into these distinct categories, you’re in a far better position to increase the level of personalisation of your email communication. This will increase engagement with your email marketing, which in turn will build customer loyalty and revenue. 

Think about it this way: you’re an events company that has 10,000 customers on your email list who are based across the UK. There’s last-minute availability at one of your event spaces in Newcastle, and you want to offer a discount so you don’t miss out on revenue. You wouldn’t email your entire email list, because customers in Cornwall are unlikely to engage with your email and could see it as spam, which sometimes a blast email can be. Instead, you’d want to email customers in the northeast, who have perhaps browsed your site or engaged with your brand within the last couple of months. That way, you’re far more likely to have higher engagement and fewer frustrated customers.

How to segment your customers for email marketing

Now that you know a little more about what it is, we want to explore how to create a customer segmentation strategy so you can efficiently and effectively communicate with your customers and increase engagement.

Establish your goals

Rather than diving in and splitting your entire email list into segments, the first thing you need to do is establish what your goals are. Because unless you know the goals, you won’t be able to create email campaigns and segments that will achieve them.

These goals will link back to the overall goals of your business, but consider what they should be for email marketing and how they feed into that. Would you like to increase the ROI of your email marketing, decrease unsubscribe rates or increase average order value? Based on the fact that you’re reading this guide, it’s likely that one of these goals will be to drive conversions. Once you know the goals you can then craft your segments with these in mind.

Gather your data

The most valuable asset you can have when planning an effective segmentation strategy is data. Without data, it’s impossible to segment your customers, and the more comprehensive and up-to-date your data is the better your email marketing will be.

Data helps you understand your audience. Not just who and where they are, but their behaviours, trends, preferences and pain points. Data can come from anywhere, such as when your customer signed up to your website, browsing data, purchase history, email engagement, social media engagement and more.

A fast and convenient way to access all your data sources is via Apteco Orbit, which can automate time-consuming data-related tasks and leave you with comprehensive and actionable insights. 

Define demographics

Of course, one of the most obvious ways to segment your customers is through demographics. This includes age, gender, job title, salary and more. But, this isn’t enough – yes, it’s incredibly useful to segment customers using demographic data, but it needs to be just one part of the data puzzle or you won’t secure the level of engagement and conversions you’re hoping to achieve.

Define geographic area

Another key part of demographics is defining where your customers live. This isn’t just useful for sending email communications featuring region-specific deals, but also has several other important uses:

• Ensures you remain compliant with local data protection and privacy laws
• Allows you to send emails at times when you’re likely to get the highest engagement
• Allows for a greater level of personalisation
• Provide accurate information related to times across separate time zones

Look at engagement

Email marketing isn’t about sending emails en masse and hoping some of them land – it’s about knowing when you’re fighting a losing battle. Sometimes a winning strategy can be sending an email to customers with the highest engagement rates, open rates or click-through rates.

Customers might stop being active customers for various reasons, such as they no longer need your product or service, their priorities have changed, they don’t have the budget, they’re locked out of their email and can’t get it back… and dozens more. If you continue to send emails to customers who haven’t opened the previous 20, it’s going to have a negative impact on your engagement rate.

Similarly, you can also segment inactive customers and try to re-engage them by sending exclusive, limited-time-only offers. 

Analyse purchase-related metrics

You should have plenty of data related to what your customers are buying and when they’re buying it, as well as other trends and insights that can influence your email segmentation strategy.

Purchase history

The first port of call is by looking at what your customers are buying. This helps you see what they want when they want it and identify patterns. This enables you to contact individual customers and remind them that they might be due to reorder something soon and they should definitely do that through you.

Time since the last purchase

When you want to reach out to customers who have bought a product on your website, you can do this depending on when they made their purchase. For example, if you own a car dealership, you might want to email customers who bought a car from you 11 months ago to remind them that their MOT and service are due soon. Emailing customers who only bought something from you last month won’t get much use from it (and may in fact have a negative impact).

Another option is to segment your customers based on whether they’ve made a one-time purchase or if they’re frequent buyers. Loyal customers won’t need as much convincing to spend their money with you, while one-time customers will probably need a very different approach to convert them into loyal customers.

Abandoned carts

Did you know that 85% of e-commerce orders on mobile devices don’t get past the checkout stage? That’s billions of pounds of purchases sitting in shopping carts due to a huge variety of reasons. This could be because of the cost, browsing for gifts, price comparisons, shipping costs, saving something for later and so on.

By segmenting customers who have items abandoned in their cart, you can give them the nudge they need to complete their purchase, such as free shipping, 10% off, extra reward points, or guaranteed delivery before a certain date.

Consider buyer persona

Your business has likely already identified your buyer personas (and if you haven’t then it’s something you should do right after finishing reading this article). You can use your buyer personas to segment your customers to see if you know them as much as you think you do. 

You can also tailor your content depending on your persona’s needs. For example, what are their pain points and goals? What kind of offer or promotion would likely result in a higher conversion rate? Does the tone of voice you use in the email reflect the persona?

Planning your email communications

Once you’ve established your email segments and have your email marketing platform in place, you can begin planning your email marketing campaigns to give conversions a much-needed boost.

Below are nine steps needed to plan the perfect campaign:

1. Decide which segment or segments you want to target and identify their goals, challenges and pain points. These are what the content of your email campaign is going to focus on to drive conversions.
2. Establish a content calendar while paying close attention to important dates, seasonality, day of the week, proximity to payday and more.
3. Create content specific to each segment that also offers plenty of room for personalisation. Not only should this include the content itself, but how it’s presented through copy and graphics.
4. Establish workflows through automation, so follow-ups can be sent automatically based on engagement.
5. Ensure your emails are optimised with engagement in mind and include a clear call to action. You also need to ensure your email is compatible across all devices.
6. Test your email before sending it to make sure all content and links work. If you’re doing A/B testing then all variations should be working as intended before progressing.
7. Schedule your campaigns paying close attention to the preferences and behaviours of your segments. You must also adhere to data protection and privacy laws related to where your customers are based.
8. To create a seamless custom experience, integrate your email marketing with other channels which keeps messaging consistent and helps build brand loyalty.
9. Keep a close eye on data so you can make refinements throughout the process. If you’re A/B testing this is especially important as you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

For more information read our beginner’s guide to getting started with email marketing.

Monitoring customer interaction with your emails

We already touched on it above, but monitoring how customers engage with your email marketing is critical if you want to maximise conversions. Not only can you make changes to future campaigns, but also make changes to strategies that are underway.

Your analytics tool will be able to pull comprehensive, real-time data that offers you actionable insights. This can include:

• Open rates
• Engagement rates
• Clickthrough rates
• Bounce rates
• Conversion rates
• Unsubscribe rates
• Device data
• Location data
• Heatmaps
• Data related to time and day
• A/B testing results
• Customer journey tracking

Each of these plays a huge part in refining the customer experience to help you turn customers into loyal brand advocates who are all too happy to keep spending money with you.

Determine the success of your strategy

At the end of a campaign, you should determine whether or not it was a success and whether or not your strategy contributed towards an increase in conversions. This means going back to the goals you outlined at the start of the process to see if your KPIs were met. But, there are also many additional metrics you might want to consider to work out whether or not your strategy was successful. Some of these could include:

• Email marketing analytics (as outlined above)
• Revenue and email marketing ROI
• Metrics related to specific segments
• Email list growth
• Unsubscribes/spam complaints
• Engagement levels on other platforms, such as social media
• Customer feedback