Effective Ways to Work Email Segmentation for Increased Conversions
What is one of the tops reasons that a new business might fail within the first few years? Failing to have a strong online presence is a surefire way to lose the sales a business needs to stay afloat in 2021.
In spite of all the attention social media marketing receives in the digital age, it’s not all about social media. Did you know that email marketing is still the number one way to get conversions? In fact, for every dollar spent on email marketing, businesses make an average of $42 in exchange.
Without email segmentation, however, you can’t expect to see such a high return on investment from your email marketing campaigns.
What is email segmentation? How does it work and how can your business approach it to see increased conversions? Read on to find out everything you need to know.
What Is Email Segmentation?
Any good marketing campaign starts with a target audience. This allows you to discern who you should be trying to reach and thinking about where you can reach them–which, as we mentioned earlier, tends to be online.
It’s always a good business practice to build up a server of email accounts used by your current, former, or potential customers. Sending out information, ads, and promotions through email is a great way to reach an audience. However, a single list of every email address you send marketing materials to is too chaotic to be truly productive.
Email segmentation is the process of breaking up that list into more specific lists based on a designated set of criteria. There are a number of ways to look at the demographics of your target market, which we’ll discuss in detail below.
What Purpose Does Email Segmentation Serve?
What’s the point of breaking up your target audience into smaller segments?
Chances are your target audience is a lot more vast than you may have expected. Think about it. Is there really only one kind of person who enjoys your products?
The answer is almost definitely no, which means that you shouldn’t take a single approach to reach your customers. When you develop segmented email servers, you can start to develop a segmented campaign.
What that means is that you can shape your emails to meet the interests and needs of your different target audiences. Why send out an email about, for example, your toys and baby clothes to everyone, including people who don’t have children? Instead, send those emails straight to parents and market your products for adults to those who don’t have kids.
Ultimately, the idea is to make sure that you’re appealing to all of your customers in ways that really speak to them. The effect is that you’ll increase the number of interactions your email marketing campaigns receive and lower the number of people who unsubscribe as a result of receiving irrelevant emails. At the same time, you’ll maximize your conversions by appealing more directly to your segmented audience and operating multiple email campaigns at once.
How to Gather Useful Demographic Information From Your Customers
At this point, you’re probably wondering how you’re supposed to find the information you need to segment your market. How are you supposed to know how old your subscribers are, where exactly they live, or any other aspects of their identity that may be useful to you?
One way to start building up a segmented market is to ask for this information when your customers subscribe to your emails. It’s not uncommon for businesses to prompt subscribers to enter things like their age, gender, and zip code when subscribing.
However, you may already have a substantial list of subscribers whose information you didn’t collect in the first place. What can you do to retrieve that information now?
Our data enrichment program is a valuable tool that lets you fill in the gaps in your email list. We can use the information you already have to collect data such as consumer age, gender, race, ethnicity, postal code, and more. The more information you have about your customers, the better.
Examples of Segmented Markets to Target With Your Email Campaign
As promised, we’re going to take a closer look at some of the most effective ways that you can create segmented markets for your email campaign. Keep in mind, once you start sending out segmented emails, you don’t have to feel like you’re locked into one pattern.
By tracking things like conversion rates, you can determine which of your segmented campaigns are successful and which need to be tweaked to maximize results. Our email activity tracker makes it easy to see how your subscribers and consumers are interacting with your emails and whether or not your email campaigns are producing the desired effect. We provide easy-to-understand data that will give you a clear picture of your return on investment and how you can sharpen your next campaign.
Breaking Up Demographics: The Basics
One of the simplest ways to approach email segmentation is to break up your email list by basic demographic categories. These categories include:
- Age (typically dividing up your audience into categories like “teens, young adults, middle-aged adults, and older adults” or breaking up your audience by decade)
- Gender
- Race
- Ethnicity
- Parental status
- Marital status
- Homeowner status
While these categories aren’t perfect, you can see how they might reveal some of the different needs and desires of your overarching target audience. For example, single young adults may have very different consumer habits and priorities than married older adults.
Segmented Campaigns Based on Geographic Location and Climate
Depending on how wide-reaching your business is, it can make a lot of sense to break up your overarching target audience based on where they live. Take, for example, a business that has consumers all over the nation. Chances are that someone in California is looking for different products or services than someone in Maine.
If you want to get even more specific, you can craft email campaigns around weather patterns, climates, or seasons. It’s no secret that it makes more sense to market a line of bathing suits in the spring and summer and a line of winter coats in the fall and winter. By that same logic, it can be advantageous to market a line of rain boots and umbrellas if you know that one of your target regions is about to get hit by a week of heavy rain.
Segmented Campaigns Based on Subscriber or Consumer Behavior
Perhaps one of the most effective ways to segment your email list is based on subscriber or consumer behavior. If a fourth of your customers all showed interest in a line of cookware, it’s likely that they’ll also want to know more about other home goods, particularly products that relate to the kitchen.
This approach takes after the, “You may also like…” model. In other words, you track how your consumers are behaving on your website: what they’re clicking on, what they’re putting in their shopping cart, and what they’re actually purchasing. Then, you send them emails that cater to those habits and encourage them to make similar decisions.
Making Space For Your Newest Consumers or Subscribers
What should you do when you have a first-time customer or a brand new subscriber? Make them feel welcome!
Whether or not you have demographic information about the newest members of your email list, it’s useful to group them in the same category for at least a few weeks.
Then, you can send them emails offering them special deals as new customers or providing a rundown of what your business sells and stands for. The most important thing is to keep them engaged for those first few weeks. That way, you’re a lot more likely to have a customer for life, rather than a one-time shopper.
Let Us Help You Segment Your Audience for Your Next Email Marketing Campaign
Email marketing is still the number one way to see a real return on investment in any digital marketing campaign. Email segmentation plays a vital role in that high rate of success. With our tools, you can take control of your email marketing campaign and start increasing conversions quickly and efficiently–we have a 99.5% accuracy rate to prove it!
To get started, log in to an existing account or make a new account with EmailOversight. We can’t wait to help you take your email list from cluttered and chaotic to organized and fruitful!
