Table of Contents
Email marketing is all about sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
Another way to look at it is that these are the three keys to effective email marketing:
- Sending the right message = copy & design
- Sending it to the right people = segmentation
- Sending it at the right time = scheduling
Your emails’ copy, design and scheduling can all be optimized over time through A/B testing.
Segmentation is the only key that can’t be optimized, but is instead the foundation from which you should build your emails.
It is the method of defining a smaller audience from your email list, for the purpose of sending a more relevant email.
By segmenting your audience you will able to:
- craft personalized messages
- improve your open and click rates
- reduce spam reports and unsubscribe rates
- expand your email marketing strategy
Personalizing Your Messages
Email service providers such as MailerLite help you personalize your marketing emails by using consented user data such as:
- website events
actions that visitors do on your website, including adding a product to their shopping cart, initiating checkout, purchase history, and viewing a product or page - form completions
when a user submits a form on your website, this can either trigger an email automation, or their answers can be used for marketing purposes - newsletter preferences
most ESPs can let you build a custom preferences page to collect information such as product or blog topic interests
Here are two examples of how to use these methods to personalize a message:
- If you want to promote a specific product, create a segment for people who have viewed, added to cart, started checkout, and have never bought this product.
- You can run a giveaway contest that requires contestants to complete a quiz, and later use their quiz answers to tailor a promotion just for them.
Improve Email Engagement
As the size of your email list grows, your open and click rates will naturally decrease.
This is because it’s hard to send a message that is relevant to large numbers of people at a time; this logic applies to all of advertising.
But the beauty of email marketing is that you don’t have to blindly email your entire list.
Segmentation will help you boost your email open rates, click rates, and conversion rates!
This is because a personalized message is often more relevant to a person, and relevant emails are more likely to be opened, clicked, or close a purchase!
Improve Email Deliverability
Not only will segmentation improve your email engagement, but it’ll also improve your deliverability.
Email deliverability refers to metrics such as your spam and unsubscribe rates.
If you have a high spam rate or high unsubscribe rate, your future emails are more likely to land in junk mail.
To keep your spam and unsubscribe rates low, you can use segmentation to create a personalized message for smaller groups of people from your list.
This is important because the most common reason why your emails get spammed or unsubscribed from, is because they’re irrelevant.
Conclusion
Segmentation refers to creating a relevant message for a segmented part your list.
It will benefit your email marketing strategy by:
- delivering personalized messages
- improving your email open rates, click rates, conversion rates
- reducing your spam reports and unsubscribes
The best marketing agencies focus a lot of their efforts on segmentation.
Which is why our white-label email marketing services enable agencies to focus on managing clients, while we take care of all the technical work.
Further reading:
4 basic segmentation methods
RFM Segmentation