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As your email list grows, so will the number of people that unsubscribe from your list — especially if your emails lack personalization.
Segmentation becomes increasingly important, especially once your list surpasses 10000 subscribers. In order to keep your engagement and deliverability high, you will need to send more relevant emails.
To accomplish this, here are four common ways to efficiently segment your list:
1. Engaged Segments
This is the most common behavioural segment in email marketing.
Subscribers that frequently open or click your emails are considered engaged subscribers, and they’re a great segment to send most of your emails to.
The size of this segment is a good indicator of how engaging your emails are. In fact, many email marketers consider your engaged segment to be the true size of your list.
A good rule of thumb is to aim for 80% of your list being engaged.
The segment definition for your engaged group will depend on your email service provider (ESP):
For example:
In Klaviyo, you can define your engaged segment as the number of people who have opened or clicked your email within past __ days.
In MailerLite however, you would instead define your unengaged segment as the number of people who haven’t opened or clicked your emails in the past __ days. You can then exclude the unengaged segment from your emails, to target your engaged subscribers.
The number of days was left blank because this will vary between different brands and their customer lifecycles.
Measuring Engagement
In general, you’ll want to define your engaged segment based on your customers’ average time between conversions.
For example:
If your customers usually place an order every 90 days, then you should define your engaged segment as people who have opened or clicked your emails within the past 90 days.
Once you’ve defined your engaged segment, you can play around with different levels of engagement.
With the example above, you might find that segmenting your engaged group to 30 or 60 days gets you more sales, whereas people who haven’t engaged for 120 days might need nurturing.
2. Preference-based Segments
If you’ve set up your opt-in strategy to collect user preferences (if not, you should definitely consider it), you can build a number of segments around this data.
These segments are great to deliver emails that are relevant to what your subscribers want to receive.
Some examples of preference-based segments include:
- Sales and Promotions: these are subscribers who have indicated that they only want to receive sales/promotional emails
- New Blog Content: these subscribers want to receive email notifications whenever you publish a new blog post
- Content Interests: if your blog has multiple content categories, subscribers might want to only receive email notifications about a certain topic
If you want to avoid sending too many emails to your list, you can also create frequency preferences:
- Once a week: these subscribers prefer to only hear from you once a week, so you can adjust your campaign strategy to only send your most important messages accordingly
- Once a month: these subscribers don’t want too many emails, so you can send a monthly newsletter that summarizes upcoming promotions, new content, and other brand updates
ESPs like Klaviyo and Customer.io have a smart send feature, which lets you limit the number of emails a subscriber can get each day.
3. Loyalty Program Segments
These are great segments for e-commerce stores that use a customer loyalty/rewards plugin.
These plugins will often integrate with your email service provider so that you can:
- segment loyalty members based on their points balance
- promote your loyalty program to non-members
- give special promotions to your most loyal customers
Alternatively you can create your own loyalty/rewards program with just segmentation.
Shopify integrates with ESPs so that you can segment your list based on their lifetime value (LTV).
This lets you send personalized messages to your best customers, or help nurture newer customers by sending them educational content.
4. VIP Segments
VIPs can be people who have spent a lot of money at your online store, or long-term subscribers who frequently comment and engage with your content.
However you choose to define your VIPs, it’s important to give this segment special treatment for their support:
- give them early access to your promotions
- send them personalized emails during holidays, birthdays or subscription anniversaries
- invite them to any local events, meet and greets or conventions that you attend
Summary
There are many ways you can segment your list, especially since each brand has their own unique audience.
But segmenting your list based on email engagement, preferences, and loyalty will help you deliver relevant messages, to the right people.
It’s especially important to treat your most VIPs with utmost importance, as they’re your true brand enthusiasts who want you to succeed.
This level of segmentation may not be necessary until you’ve reached at least 10000 subscribers though. If you hadn’t reached that point yet, then focus on your opt-in strategy and keep driving traffic to your website.
There’s so many other segments that can be built, it all depends on the brand.
Which is why marketing agencies resell our white-label email marketing services; we take care of all the technical work while they focus on acquiring clients and managing accounts.