Increase Relevance (and Sales!) with Email Segmentation
One of the most popular channels to reach consumers is through email marketing, yet countless marketing messages go ignored and unread. We’re all bombarded with thousands of marketing messages throughout the day, and people run avoidance measures in an effort to escape many of these messages. So how do you keep consumers interested and engaged in your emails? One word: segmentation.
Why email segmentation is important
Email segmentation lets you cut through the clutter by staying relevant and providing material your audience is interested in. You send email with one type of content to a group of customers, based on their interest, and an email with another type of content to another group of customers, and so on. This also reduces your email unsubscribe rate.
You can begin segmenting your audience by sending a general email to your entire list, with different topics and links embedded. Keep track of who clicks what links. From there you can group clickers by what topics they followed. Send specific emails to the different groups headlining with the stories and offers that will interest them the most. This is how to segment your audience by interest.
Another way to implement email segmentation is by geography. For example, if you are a racing team that travels from track to track, you probably have fans all over the US. But it isn’t likely that a fan in California is going to travel to Florida, Ohio, and Indiana when you have races there. So, to avoid bombarding those fans with emails that won’t really appeal to them, segment and send only information about your race at nearby tracks. A critical piece of the puzzle here is having geographic data. You can capture that when someone signs up for your emails, or you can collect that afterwards by appending your email file with address information at the state level.
One of the most effective ways to segment your emails is by using buying history from your customer file. Segment customers into groups like Chevy or Ford parts buyers, or buyers of truck accessories or sports car parts for example.
There are countless examples when it comes to segmenting, you can experiment for yourself to find out what works. A few other segmenting options include demographics or recency (or frequency) of opened emails.
Take these ideas into consideration and plan your segmentation strategy to give a boost to your email effectiveness.
If you’re looking for ways to improve email effectiveness give us a call, we have years of experience segmenting customer data. For more information see our main email marketing page.
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