Trying to come up with relevant email campaigns is always painful.
Trust me on this, if you’re sending bulk email campaigns with the same content to all subscribers, you’re digging a hole for your business.
In short: That is out-dated and useless.
Here is a bright idea to grow your email marketing ROI.
Instead of sending the same email campaign to your whole email list, why not take inspiration from outside and understand:
- What subscribers are interested in?
- What’s kind of problem they want to solve?
- And what would get them to buy from you?
By answering those questions you’ll be able to leave behind the old “send to all” email campaign. The new email era is about creating targeted email campaigns that would increase your conversion rates.
I’ll show you exactly how to do that in 30 minutes or less. This guide includes:
- What is targeted email marketing?
- Reasons why should you segment your email list
- The benefits of targeted email marketing
- 5 proven email marketing segmentation strategies
- How to segment your email list
Let’s get right into it!
What is Targeted Email Marketing?
Targeted email marketing is the process of creating and sending highly customized and personalized emails to a very specific segment of your email list.
The practice of targeted email marketing grants you the desired customer action you’re aiming for. It increases the results of your lead generation strategies.
Simultaneously increasing your email marketing conversion rates.
Applying targeted marketing strategies in small business email marketing could result in a significant increase in conversion.
To make the best out of targeted email marketing, you need to lay some foundation first by segmenting your subscribers.
What is email segmentation?
Email segmentation is an email marketing practice of segmenting subscribers to make it easier to group contacts who share something in common.
Email list segmentation is used to deliver personalized and relevant content to your subscribers based on the following criteria:
- Age
- Specific ebook downloaders
- Paying customers
- Subscription date
- Contacts’ position
- Gender
- Geo-location
- Contacts’ engagement (Automatically added tags)
- And any other information your contacts shared with you.
Why should you segment your email list?
Each of your customers has a unique background, interests, and expectations of your brand.
That is enough reason not to send the same email to all your customers.
With list segmentation, you can personalize your messages based on each recipient’s interests, information, etc.
Segmenting your email list will help you:
- Increase open rates
- Increase click-through rates
- Increase conversions
- Decrease unsubscribes
- Avoid spam filters
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Levere data for effective targeted email marketing
Leaving all that behind? I don’t think so.
Benefits of targeted email marketing
Increase user interaction: Send targeted email campaigns to increase users’ engagement with your emails. The ultimate goal of your emails is to drive user action.
Whatever user action you’re seeking, it is going to be a result of finding value in your email content.
Targeted email marketing provides relevant value to your subscribers. It solves their problems and answers their interests.
When more of your emails get opened and links get clicked, it leads to more people converting.
Strengthen Relationships: Like romantic relationships, it is always about understanding each other.
Targeted email marketing campaigns show how deep you understand your prospects. By sending emails that match with subscribers’ interest you show that you actually understand their needs.
Increase customer lifetime: Not in real life of course, but customer retention does increase with targeted email marketing.
Your subscribers would relate to your email because it reflects their interests. They will keep coming back for more content.
Targeted email marketing is what keeps your subscribers away from the unsubscription link. In contrast, it makes them engage with your emails on a regular basis.
Relevancy: Targeted email marketing gives you endless personalization opportunities. You could use it to send personalized broadcast emails to a specific segment of your email audience.
You’ll be able to resonate with your targets’ interest, make your emails feel personal and provide them with exactly what they’re looking for.
Exactly, targeted email marketing is about making an offer that your subscribers can’t refuse.
Sending bulk emails with the same content to all your subscribers could tear down your entire business.
Always segment your contacts and go for targeted email marketing if you’re want to succeed.
Let’s look at 5 email marketing segmentation strategies to help you make the best offer.
5 Proven Email Marketing Segmentation Strategies & Ideas
1. Segment subscribers by signup source
A powerful targeted email marketing campaign starts with your website. You can segment subscribers by signup source. That helps you learn about your subscribers’ preferences.
For instance, if you run a marketing blog and you cover different marketing topics doesn’t mean that your subscribers want to hear about everything you cover.
They might be interested in email marketing, but never social media marketing.
How to make sure you reach out to your subscribers with the content they’re interested in?
By creating signup forms that tell you about your subscribers’ interest, you’ll be able to send targeted emails.
Emails that match with contacts’ preferences and increase CTR.
Here are two examples of website popups to show you how to create different segments for subscribers. Based on which form visitors subscribe through.
Here is the first signup source example:
You can tell that visitors who subscribe through your popup are interested in email marketing.
For that, whenever you have new content related to email marketing you know exactly who wants to hear about it. Eventually, it would increase your email open rates.
Yet, you can tell that subscribers from the following popup are interested in something completely different.
In this case, you’ll want to send subscribers from the first popup content about email marketing. And send subscribers from the second popup content related to lead generation strategies.
Your subscribers are different, don’t treat them all the same.
2. Segmenting by engagement
Email engagement is another way to segment your lists, but it can have a huge impact on your results.
You can measure subscribers engagement through open rate and clickthrough rate.
You don’t need to be on a calculator for that, your email marketing automation provider tracks your email performance.
You can start with a basic segment by engagement.
Segmenting your contacts into two categories, active vs inactive users to differentiate contacts who are interacting with you from those who did not open an email during the past couple of months.
For inactive users, you can create a re-engagement email campaign to win them back.
You can focus on subscribers who are active and showing signs of engagement by sending them personalized email campaigns.
For example, you send out a product announcement email for a new product release.
Contacts who open and click your email link are considered interested in your upcoming products and ready for your next sales email.
You can send a campaign to further target them as qualified leads who are more likely to buy from you.
3. Create demographic segmentation
Creating segments based on your subscribers’ demographics will help you reach the right subscriber with the right content at the right time.
As if reaching out to each subscriber in person.
If your products are only for females between 25 and 39 and you don’t want to reach out to your male contacts, a segmented email list will do the job.
AYR sent the following personalized bulk email campaign where products were promoted uniquely to female subscribers.
Here is another example of an email sent to parents so that they can shop for their families on Thanksgiving.
Here are other ways to segment your subscribers via demographic data:
- Gender
- Age
- Marital status
- Income
- Ethnicity/race
- Family size
- Nationality
- Lifestyle
- Occupation
- Education
The easiest way to segment by demographic information is with your website forms.
For example, you can ask your subscribers to select their gender so you can create different segments to customize your emails.
4. Segment leads based on their sales cycle
Visitors who abandon their shopping cart are at the bottom of the sales funnel. But they’re undecided and need more convincing to finish the purchase.
Sending cart abandonment messages are a must for every eCommerce business.
Cart abandonment rate is estimated by 76% in 2018. That means out of 100 online shoppers in your store, 76 will leave a product behind for some reason.
But this presents an opportunity to send targeted emails and increase your online sales.
You can send an email reminder to inform them that their cart is still available, featuring the products they were about to buy.
Here’s a good example from Casper on how you can follow up cart abandonment with personalized targeted email:
5. Segment contacts based on geographic data
Opened a store in New York, would it matter telling contacts who live in Australia about it?
I thought so.
Segmenting subscribers based on their location helps you send extremely personalized emails.
Here is an email sent by Pet Flow to their subscribers encouraging them to visit their new local pet store.
If you have a store for your business where people can visit you, make sure you be on top of local email marketing. That would help you increase foot traffic.
Here are some other ways to send targeted email marketing campaigns:
Time-based emails: schedule your emails to be sent at best times for customers in different time zones. Your emails should reach your subscribers when they’re awake, and preferably when they’re online.
Local email marketing: send focused emails for events or promotions in specific store locations.
Location-specific content: personalize emails by adding a location in your headlines or content. It grabs subscribers’ attention.
How to Segment Your Email List to Create Targeted Email Campaigns
Suppose that you are opening a new store in Vegas. And luckily your email database includes hundreds of customers that are living in Vegas.
You can segment your contacts who are living in Vegas and send them a personalized email to let them know that you’ve opened a new store around
At this stage, some people wonder: “Should I create a separate email list for each segment so I make things easier when I want to send a new campaign?”
Absolutely not. You don’t need to create a separate email list for each segment.
With an email list management software, you can create contact filters that allow you to segment different audiences from the same email list.
For instance, targeting contacts based on their position at a company is a success factor if you’re doing B2B email marketing.
Not only can you easily find people in your database, but you can also save them and reuse the same filter later.
Filters come in handy later if you want to only target the CEOs you have segmented.
You don’t have to send the same email to your whole list. You can rely on targeted email marketing and send relevant offers based on:
- Contacts’ life-cycle stage
- Interest
- Geo-location and more.
Segmenting contacts based on their position is one thing, imagine what else you can use it for your email marketing.
Here is a case in which we create a filter based on:
- Position (CEO)
- Active status (Active)
- Email address (Doesn’t include gmail.com)
- Subscription date (After January 1st)
- All together.
Creating filters to segment your contacts is one of the best ways to manage your email list and get into targeted email marketing.
Conclusion
Email marketing segmentation is not only for big businesses with savvy email marketers and software.
Automizy made it easy to start targeting your audience with these segmentation strategies we shared with you.
When you provide more relevant content, everybody wins.