Segmenting Your Email Marketing List
Segmenting your email marketing list is crucial for success, and it’s something you should be doing from day one.
I see tons of businesses make this mistake early on. They have super small lists and don’t think it really matters. But a list of 20 subscribers quickly turns to 200, then 2,000, and before you know it you have 20,000 subscribers that are all grouped into one giant unorganized list.
So make sure you’re segmenting subscribers as part of your email marketing opt-in strategy so that everyone on your list is put into the right category.
Read on to learn more about the importance of email segmentation and ways to segment your subscribers.
What is Email Marketing Segmentation?
Email segmentation is a personalization technique that groups email subscribers into smaller lists based on common criteria. By segmenting or splitting your subscribers into smaller lists, it helps ensure that you’re only sending them the most relevant information.
This helps increase engagement and ultimately drives more conversions with each email marketing campaign.
For example, let’s say you’re running a SaaS company. One simple way to highlight the importance of email segmentation is the ability to distinguish between leads and paying customers.
Your free trial users shouldn’t be on the same list as paid users. Email campaigns sent to free trial users should be used to educate them about your product and convert them to a paid plan. But it wouldn’t make sense if you were sending this to paid customers, as it would just cause confusion and limit the ability to upsell them down the road.
Why Should You Segment Email Marketing Lists?
The benefits of segmenting email lists become clear once you get started. It definitely requires some extra work when you’re setting things up, and you’ll also need to create or modify campaigns for each list, but the results quickly speak for themselves.
Smart marketers who know how to segment email lists benefit from:
- Increased open rates
- Higher deliverability rates
- Fewer opt-outs and unsubscribes
- Increased conversion rates
- Better data insights
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Ability to personalize customer preferences
Recent studies found that 76% of customers say that personalized marketing strategies increases their chances of making purchase, and 78% say it’s more likely that they’ll re-purchase from a brand.
4 Ways to Segment Your Email Marketing Lists
There are countless ways to segment your email marketing lists. But nearly all of the options will fall into one of the following four pillars:
- Geographic
- Psychographic
- Demographic
- Behavioral
Beyond these big-picture categories, let’s take a closer look at the ways you could use these in practice.
Examples of Email Segmentation
- Job description
- Gender
- Engagement metrics (like how many pages they visited on your website)
- Actions (like downloading an ebook vs. adding something to a shopping cart)
- Frequent buyers
- Big spenders
- Followers on social media
- Age
- Industry
- Content preferences
- Event attendance (webinar, conference, etc.)
- Previous email interaction (clicks, opens, etc.)
This is just barely scratching the surface with how you can segment your subscribers. But it’s a quick way to see how and why people in different lists shouldn’t be getting the same messages. You need to target them with different campaigns.
Action Step For Getting Started: How to Create Timely, Relevant Messages For Your Company’s Email Marketing
Even a small amount of segmentation can significantly increase your email click-through rates, subscriber retention rate, and ROI. So if you’re new to this, here’s a quick and easy way to get started using two different email styles for two different segments.
One is the email newsletter based on the content of your blog, the second is one that features special deals available only through the newsletter.
List One: Blog to Newsletter
Start with a newsletter based on blog post content.
One of the easiest ways to create this type of newsletter is to send a monthly or bi-monthly email that simply highlights your most relevant recent blog posts. As long as you are blogging consistently, this approach will save you time, since you won’t have to create anything new but an opening sentence or two. Your readers will see the intriguing headlines and blog post summaries in the email, and many will save it as a reminder or click on the links in the newsletter and start reading the content on your blog or website.
Anyone who has read your blog and then opted in to a “subscribe to our newsletter” from can be added to this list.
List Two: The Exclusive List
Next, create a list that features exclusive deals.
This list is for people who have already made a purchase or “subscribed to get a discount” (or something similar).
Almost all of our top ecommerce clients have the same thing in common when we study their website analytics and ROI:their email marketing is by far the most profitable channel and the one that drives the most website traffic. Many of our customers have email lists, built through over a decade of selling on their own and other websites, that run into the hundreds of thousands of names.
The idea here is that you can share deals that aren’t listed on your website or anyone else. They’re strictly for people on the “exclusive” list. This value proposition is enough to keep the subscriber retention rate high. In fact, the power of the “email list-only deal club” is so strong that we have seen our clients keep most of their list even when they switched from emailing twice a week to daily! This indicates it is more about the relevancy and uniqueness of the information or deals you are sending than the frequency.
How do you segment your email lists? Let me know in the comments below!
Leave a Comment!