Last week’s blog post explained what segmentation is, the benefits of segmentation and how to get started. In this weeks blog post, we delve deeper into segmentation where we break down the different ways to segment, how to segment and segmentation best practices.

Effective ways to segment your list

The great thing about segmentation is that the options for personalising your email campaigns are virtually endless.

Just remember, you need to avoid going crazy when creating segments, because if your database isn’t big enough, it’s a lot of work for a potentially small return.

Remember, Small adjustments can have a big impact.

Here are some of the best email segmentation ideas to consider

Demographics: Who are your recipients, and how are they different?
Type of Customer or User: What service plan/level are they on, how much do they spend, and when did they join?
Engagement: Who opens all emails, just some, or hardly any of your messages?
Purchasing history: How often do your recipients log in, buy, or use your product or service?

Demographics

Segment your audience based on Location, time, gender or age.
For example, segmenting your list by location can give you powerful geo-targeting capabilities. You could create a special email category for people in a particular city or state.

Better yet, use email segmentation to divide your list – into different zones, states and regions. Firstly it will tell you where your customers are and how you can find them. Secondly It could help advise how you should approach certain segments if they live in different areas. For example, a retailer could be offering distinct services or products to different locations.

Look at when your recipients open and interact with your emails then schedule them to land in their inbox at or right before that time.

Or if you know the occupation of each recipient, you can tailor the message to how they’ll most likely use your product.

Type of Customer or User

A new user or buyer would benefit from a series of welcome emails to help nurture your relationship with them.

A frequent user such as the recipients who consistently open and interact with your emails could be considered to be your VIP recipients – treat them as such by sending special offers and discounts

The customers who spend more on your product or use your service the most will interact with you much differently than the customers who spend less time with your service or product.

Engagement level

Sending emails based on subscriber behaviour is a great way to assist each of your customers throughout the buyer journey.

Who opens all emails, just some, or hardly any of your messages?

People who actively engage with your content will have different appetites for content than the segments of your audience who aren’t as engaged. For example, it would be a good indicator that someone who clicked a particular link in an email might want to receive further information on that topic.

You can use the Contact Rating condition to create a segment of your most or least engaged subscribers then send inactive users re engagement campaigns.

Click rate is also another great engagement marker. You could segment your customers based on how many times they’ve clicked on your emails during a set time period such as 30, 60, or 90 days.

Here’s a few engagement level markers you can use:

• Open rate
• Click rate
• Website engagement
• Downloads
• Spam rate
• Bounce rate
• Email heatmaps
• Content engagement
• Previous purchases

Purchasing History

The more purchases a customer makes, the more valuable they are to your business because you will have more information to build better-segmented emails in the future.

If you’ve connected your store to Mailchimp and turned on e-commerce tracking, you can target contacts based on certain purchases.
Use your customer’s purchase history to offer cross-sells or up-sells. A customer makes a purchase? send them an email pointing them towards an item that complements that purchase.

A customer has shown an interest but hasn’t yet made a purchase? It’s still possible to turn a potentially lost sale into a successful conversion. Target these users with segmented emails reminding them of their abandoned shopping cart or highlighting alternatives to items they may have expressed interest in.

Segmentation best practices

1) Start with a clean list

A segmented email list is a hygienic email list. Start segmenting your contacts as soon as they land in Mailchimp.
For optimal data hygiene, we suggest having 1 master email list and then multiple groups and segments within that list

2) Keep your segments simple

Don’t let it become a complex procedure. When creating segments, you need to pick out criteria that will actually make a difference, you don’t want to overdo it.

3)Write good content

It would be a shame to spend time segmenting your lists, only for the messaging to fall flat when it reaches the recipient.

Write good content and make sure it’s relevant to your segment, what messages will appeal to the pain points or behaviour specific to each segment?

4)Track your results

Monitor your contacts’ response to your segmentation and ensure you do this on an ongoing basis. Was it more successful than previous sends with no segmentation?

Take a look at what’s going well: which segments are getting the most opens and clicks? Keep an eye on what is not performing so well and don’t hesitate to adjust your segments or get rid of any that don’t make a difference to your email marketing.

Final thoughts

Forget sending out a blast campaign to all your subscribers because one size certainly doesn’t fit all.

These days, email segmentation and personalisation are the strategies that you need to use to help you generate real results – and it doesn’t have to be overly complicated and time-consuming.

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 your email open rates, boosted click rates, and decreased unsubscribe rates.

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

Keep testing and learn what works for you then adapt to your subscriber’s desires — that’s the point of segmentation, after all, to learn from your subscribers and give them more of what they want.

 Read Part 1, Your step by step guide to segmentation success.