By Kim Nguyen
Director of Marketing, Speakeasy Co.
Email segmentation divides people who have subscribed to your email list into small groups based on similar traits, demographics, or behaviors. Before launching any email marketing campaign, see if segmentation makes sense, as oftentimes it ensures that you’re sending highly targeted and personalized content to your subscribers.
Why Should You be Segmenting Your Email Audiences?
Mailchimp’s latest user data showed that segmented campaigns get 14.37% more opens and 64.78% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns. In a recent case study, Good Dye Young was able to increase their e-commerce monthly revenue by over 300% by utilizing highly targeted and segmented email campaigns.
5 Segmentation Strategies You Should Try
Not sure where to start? Here are 10 different segmentation strategies to test in your future email marketing campaigns.
Geographic Location
The most obvious way to segment emails is through regional targeting. For instance, imagine your tasting room is hosting a big event. If you send out an email to your entire audience list, that email will include contacts both local to you and distant. Segmenting your campaign to only subscribers local to your business will help increase open rates, and users engaged.
Website Activity
So let's say a potential customer adds a few products to his or her cart, got to checkout, but then doesn't complete the purchase. If this user inputted his or her email address before they left, you have the opportunity to retarget them with a segmented email campaign, also known as an "abandoned cart" email.
It's ideal to offer an incentive to users who abandon to complete their purchase, such as complimentary shipping or a coupon code for 10% off their entire order.
Purchase History
You can also segment audiences lists based on the number of orders they've completed, their lifetime value, or the timing of their last purchase. You can leverage this data to incentivize the following:
- Re-purchase if their last order was over 3 months ago
- Appeal to your VIP customers with the top 5% lifetime values with a referral discount for themselves and their friends
- Encourage users who have subscribed but not purchased to finally pull the trigger to their first order by highlighting product features, awards, and reviews.
Recent Subscribers
When someone subscribes to your email list, you’d want to make sure that they feel welcomed and valued. Send a welcome or introduction email from your brand when users first subscribe to your newsletter.
In your introduction email you can offer a discount for their first order, set expectations on what to expect in future email campaigns, or link to important "need to know" features about our product, like your press page, awards page, or cocktail recipes page.
Birthday Month
As an alcohol beverage company, you already have to age gate your content by determining if your website visitors are 21 or older. Why not also capture their email address while you're capturing their age? This way, you can send a promotion to your fans during their birthday month. Simply segment by birth month, and schedule a campaign on a monthly basis!
Here are some other useful resources on segmentation, based on the email marketing provider you're using:
