Unlocking the true potential of your email subscribers goes beyond just building a contact list. It’s all about harnessing the power of segmentation and finding your niche.

Think of it like a cake…

Just like a cake, your audience can be divided into delectable slices based on their unique preferences and characteristics.

Each slice represents a niche within your audience, with its own set of desires and needs.

By slicing the cake, you cater to different tastes, ensuring every guest gets the piece they crave the most.

Ready to indulge in the secrets of finding your niche and revolutionising your email marketing strategy? Keep reading as we take you on a mouthwatering journey to uncover and satisfy your audience’s deepest desires.

Let’s slice the cake and make segmentation work wonders for your email campaigns!

What is a Niche?

Your email subscribers are an important source of information. The data they provide helps to inform the content and messaging which is most relevant to them.

But every one of your subscribers can be made even more valuable… By putting those subscribers into a niche.

This involves determining, outlining, and understanding the needs and wants of your prospects and putting them into a small (niche) market segment.

A niche is simply a subset of your list with its own unique preferences and needs.

…Having a niche helps you establish a loyal customer base by defining your target audience in more practical ways

…Having a niche allows your prospects to effectively identify your product and brand, and lets you be secure in the knowledge that your offer suits their needs and the information you provide to them is right.

In fact, it’s vital because it allows you to deliver personalised and relevant content to a specific target audience.

Letting you understand your audience more, their world, their problems, and their challenges.

Which in turn allows you to…

• Build stronger relationships
• Discover new leads to increase your sales
• Drive customer loyalty and advocacy, resulting in more cost-effective marketing and business success.

By focusing on a niche, you attract qualified leads, reduce unsubscribe rates, and improve email deliverability.

How do you understand your niche?

Well, the answer lies in segmentation.

This is simply dividing your audience into different groups, based on demographics, activity, or any other metric you’d like to use. It’s a way of getting Mailchimp to identify people with similar aspects and combine them.

Think about your customers. They each have unique needs, traits, pain points, and expectations for your business.

Therefore, the most effective way to communicate with your target customer is by making them part of a group or list.

With segmentation, you can be aligned fully with your subscriber’s needs.

This allows you to target the right people with the right message at the right time – because everyone’s different, and they all want different things.

We all like different types of cake but without segmentation, you may as well be serving all of your customers the same slice of cake,…

And…

If all you have to give them is something generic, then they’re not getting something back that is worth the value of their information.

Segmentation is all about creating value

And to create value – every time you write an email you need to be asking yourself,…

“Would my ideal customer be interested in reading this email?”

By tailoring your strategy to meet the specific needs and preferences of your prospects you can foster stronger relationships, boost customer loyalty, and ultimately drive higher revenues.

How do you slice the cake?

Or more importantly, how do you slice that cake up to find that niche?…

Think about every one of your subscribers on your list,…

If you could grant yourself one wish to learn something about them, what would it be?

• Are they interested in a specific product or a certain category?
• Do they have a particular pain point?
• At what point are they in the customer journey?

Then ask them that one question.

The aim is to gather information about your prospect to specifically target their needs.

If you run a women’s clothing store for example you can ask them about their size and then break your list down into niches such as products for petite women and those for tall women.

If you provide training it makes sense to know what level of training they have done before so you can provide the right level of tuition, so ask them!

“Are you new or established? “

Say, for example, you provide a fitness service, you could segment your list into groups based on their fitness level, goals, and workout preferences.

What one question could you ask? Use that question to find your niche.

E.g., “ What is your fitness level?”

You can then divide your list up based on fitness levels allowing you to tailor your content specifically for those types of people.

This can then be refined to further niche markets based on specific needs, identities, and preferences.

You’re picking a specific part of the cake further to focus on such as:

• Geographical location.
• Lifecycle stage.
• Awareness, consideration, and decision stage.
• Industry
• Interest
• Past purchases
• Previous engagement with your brand.
• Language
• Job Title

Having a niche gives you a very specific “perfect customer” for your product or services.

When you offer specific products or services instead of a wide variety, you benefit by understanding your customer. saving money, and becoming more productive.

This will also give you a leading edge over your competitors who are probably sending out general emails to everyone on their list.

That one question…How do you ask?

First things first, you need to examine what information you have already available. This will allow you to determine the data you need to start collecting and the data you need to ask for.

Where do you get that data?

Having different ways that people can ‘sign up’ to your email list (e.g. from a footer, from a form on your website, offering a free guide, from a landing page) is one of the most effective ways to collect data as it will give you the ability to identify which method they’ve used and segment on that basis.

You can then send them messages based on where they signed up and what information they’ve provided upon signing up.

Add one question to your form

You can ask your audience to indicate their preferences when signing up and give them plenty of opportunities to update those preferences by including a suitable call to action in your emails.

Adding a custom field to your sign-up form with category options to be selected at the moment of subscription, will allow you to create segments based on this custom field later.

The main focus here is collecting and analysing data to align with relevant and strategic segments.

Don’t just focus on standard information such as name/email, ask for 1 key piece of info.

And when you’ve decided on that one question you’ll need to ask yourself…

Does this custom field make business sense to me?
Does this custom field make sense to my customers?

The key thing to remember is that you can always change that one question over time…

Final Thoughts

As your audience changes or grows, you’ll need to ensure that you stay on top of the segments you are targeting.

By narrowing your focus and sending messages to targeted groups within your lists, your recipients will find your campaigns more relevant

—and relevant campaigns get better results.

Having more relevant emails means a better response from subscribers, not to mention increased email open rates, boosted click rates, and decreased unsubscribe rates.

So keep testing and learn what works for you then adapt to your subscriber’s desires — that’s the point of finding your niche and segmentation after all, to learn from your subscribers and give them that piece of cake that is guaranteed to be the slice that they will enjoy the most.

If you’re not sure how to capture your audience’s data segment and find your niche then why not book a 121 with us to get the insights and answers you need. Together we can build and create a strategy that authentically engages your audience the right way.