Email marketing is one of the most powerful channels for businesses to connect with consumers, market their business or products, and build brand loyalty. Email marketing campaigns will ultimately be successful, however, largely because of the effect it can have on the recipient. This is where segmentation comes into play.
Segmentation is a technique for grouping email lists into subsets that share common characteristics, like demographics, interests or behavior. By categorizing your list, you can tailor the content of your emails to each audience’s interests and preferences, and therefore ensure greater conversions and engagement. In this article, let’s look at five ways to extract segmentation data from your emails.
1. Sign-Up Forms and Landing Pages
Sign-up forms and landing pages are usually the first contact your business makes with subscribers. This direct connection offers an opportunity to gather valuable data at a glance. If you’re creating these forms, consider adding fields for demographic information such as age, gender, and location. You can also supplement your data collection with interest-based questions that reflect the items or services you are providing.
If you want to encourage users to fill in more details, consider providing them with rewards — exclusive discounts, downloadable materials, or sneak peeks at new products. These incentives can make users reveal more information and help you segment your audience right from the beginning.
2. Behavioral Tracking
Once you’ve captured some initial data at the sign-up, the next step is to start digging a little deeper into how subscribers interact with your brand over time. Behavior monitoring plays a vital role in offering insights about what your users do on your site and in your email marketing campaigns.
Pageviews, CTR, and time spent on specific pieces of content are the primary metrics you want to monitor. By mining this information, you can understand the interests and preference of different subscriber types.
For example, if one group of people consistently views content for a particular type of product, you can create segmented email campaigns to target them. Not only does this acquiescence ensure a more pronounced bond between your brand and your target audience, it also results in improved engagement and conversion rates.
3. Purchase History
For retailers, the purchase history of an online purchase can open a great deal of segmentation doors. If you study customer purchasing behaviours, you can spot trends in hot products or services within your niches.
Another successful segmentation tactic is to group your audience according to their buying behavior. For example, first-time customers might need compelling emails to reorder; returning customers might want special deals or VIP treatment in recognition of their continued business.
You can also use purchase history data to offer tailored recommendations to specific customers. This strategy can significantly improve customer satisfaction and makes them feel valued and heard — this, in turn, can improve conversion rates.
4. Email Engagement Metrics
Finally, measuring the engagement of your subscribers on your emails is essential for continual growth and segmentation. Open, click, and conversion rates are metrics that provide information about subscriber interest and engagement.
You can even break down your subscribers into engaged, passive, and unengaged groups, then create campaigns specifically geared toward each of them. For instance, a re-engagement campaign for abandoned subscribers might feature new products, offers or old content they’ve forgotten about. This segmentation not only improves your email deliverability but also helps you to optimize your content strategy around what appeals most to your users.
5. Surveys and Feedback Requests
Another good way to collect segmentation data are well designed surveys and requests for feedback. These instruments enable you to directly query subscribers for their tastes, likes, and satisfaction.
Create small and easy-to-interview surveys that are focused on specific items, like what you’d like to see covered, how frequently you want to receive emails, and how you would like to feel about your brand. To encourage engagement, consider offering perks such as giveaways or exclusive content. These incentives can increase click-through rates and give you more depth and segment your audience.
6. Social Media Insights
Your social media profiles provide the key demographic data that can support your email segmentation strategy. If you analyze engagement data (likes, shares, comments, demographics, etc.) you’ll learn a great deal about what your followers are interested in.
If you know what your subscribers are most likely to want to read, then segmenting your email list can be very helpful. Customize your email communications based on the activity you see on your social media platforms. This cross-platform messaging style not only strengthens your brand’s voice, it also creates a more individualized user experience.
7. Loyalty and Referral Programs
If your brand has a loyalty or referral program, you already have a huge resource for segmentation data. Tracking participant behavior allows you to identify your best and most committed customers and segment them based on tier status or level of engagement.
You could, for example, craft emails to top loyalty customers, presenting them with exclusive deals, previews of new products or unique content created especially for them. It is important to acknowledge and reward these customers because it strengthens their commitment to your brand.
What’s more, you can use the data from referral programs to highlight brand ambassadors — customers that will convert into new subscribers. Recognizing and rewarding them will enable you to build a community of loyal customers that promote your brand, and fill your email list with relevant leads.
Conclusion:
Segmentation is one of the most efficient tools that email marketers use but you’ll need the right data to use it. By gathering segmentation data at every step, you will send more targeted, personalized emails that your readers will love and convert. Signup forms, polls and surveys, website statistics, email opens and social shares are all good sources of segmentation information to build better email marketing campaigns.
