Believe it or not, but launching an email marketing campaign is one of the most efficient ways to expand your company’s reach and engagement. This is why creating tailored content and sharing it via email with your clients is crucial. Apart from effectively conveying your message and prompting a certain action, you should also make sure that design is sharp and visually appealing.
That said, email marketing doesn’t end with the launch. It starts with planning, collecting an audience, defining its segments, and finishes with sending the right message in the right design and measuring results. And we didn’t even mention yet that all of this should be done in the time of your audience’s highest activity on media!
While email marketing obviously takes lots of time and effort to master, it can be easy with the right strategy and tools. Today we’ll focus on email segmentation as part of preparing your email campaigns — from building an email list to defining audience segments and launching your campaigns.
Building email list as a starting point of preparing campaigns
Without an audience, you won’t have anyone to send your emails to. Which is why building that list is the first thing you should start your planning with.
Now, as you start building your email list, there are several tips to keep in mind:
- Research shows that a proper email list can increase engagement of your audience, thus boosting engagement rates.
- Personalized emails, if properly segmented, can increase your income by up to 58%.
- Inactive subscribers should be regularly purged to ensure proper ROI and wise email investments.
- Regular measurements of your email campaign results should happen to enhance the efficacy of your marketing campaigns.
- A/B testing should happen to test how various approaches to copy and design work with your audience segments.
- Last but not least, various tools should be used to optimize manual processes and reduce time spent on email creation.
Practical steps for email segmentation
Since you already know some of the best practices, let’s proceed to particular steps you need to take for proper and efficient email segmentation:
- Establish strict criteria. Consider your audience preferences, buying history, demography, engagement history, and some other criteria for proper definition of key segments.
- Collect helpful information. Use surveys, lead gen forms, and other ways to track user behavior to collect as much data on your existing audience as you can.
- Rely on segmentation features. Use an email marketing solution with rich segmentation features to set various audience segments for further campaign management.
- Prepare tailored content. Create tailored content meeting the unique interests of your audience. Use language that speaks personally to each audience segment.
- Test and adjust. Once launched, make sure you keep an eye on the results you get and fine-tune your emails based on your analytics information. It should help you improve your results even further.
Tips for segmenting your email list
The type of business you run will determine how to segment an email list, but more significantly, the target audience is what matters most. You could decide to divide up by:
- Geography: What is the base of your contacts? What kind of money do they purchase? This is especially pertinent to organizations who engage in e-commerce.
- Gender: Does your firm need to send out separate messages to men and women? It’s helpful to know this information if you own a clothes brand. Not so much for a lot of other businesses, including software.
- Language: Are you able to communicate with your connections in their language of choice? Linguistic segmentation of your email lists is a potent tool if your team speaks many languages. Expert advice: don’t assume a contact’s favorite language just because you know where they are.
- Use of the website: To find out how a visitor is interacting with your website, use page-level targeting. Those data can be used to build nurturing emails that are pertinent. You can probably tell what someone’s hobbies are if they subscribed to your blog post on the Ultimate Cupcake Tower Inspiration and saw 10 of your cupcake recipes.
- Lead-magnet coupling: Gather information about the lead magnets—such as ebooks and other downloadables—that your contacts interact with and convert on. Additionally, if you’re utilizing tools like the pop-up forms from Constant Contact, pay attention to the individual pop-ups and opt-ins that users interact with.
- Engagement level: Based on open and click rates, or even what contacts click on, create categories of highly engaged contacts. As an alternative, create inactivity segments for contacts who have not been engaged, to whom you may send a re-engagement pipeline.
Bonus: Best practices for boosting email efficiency
In addition to email segmentation, incorporating a free chatbot builder from providers like Selzy, Tars and Chatfuel can further enhance customer engagement. Integrating chatbots into your email campaigns enables businesses to offer instant support, gather valuable insights, and guide subscribers seamlessly through the conversion funnel.
Radicati Group Inc. analysis indicates that out of the 246 billion emails sent and received daily, 128 billion are for commercial use. Email segmentation can mean the difference between a client opening an email and deleting it since there are so many emails arriving in their inboxes.
Businesses can profit from list segmentation in email campaigns in a variety of ways, beyond only being able to send relevant and personalized information to certain groups of subscribers. These benefits include:
- More clicks and a greater open rate
- More income from emails
- And more business from returning customers