What Is Email Marketing Segmentation?
Email marketing segmentation allows you to laser focus your marketing messages to all of your subscribers as if they are a market of one, because in reality – they are just one person reading the one email you sent. Market segmentation promotes customer loyalty by making them feel special. It also increases open rates, sales, branding and more. If you’re not practicing market segmentation using your email marketing technology, you’re missing out.
To get started with successful market segmenting, take a look at how your email marketing technology works, such as aweber. If you don’t know how it works, you may want to hire a specialist to help you improve your marketing. Most of the marketing segmentation can be done automatically if you set up your technology correctly. So it might be a good idea to pay someone to set it up right then you are set.
Separate Customers from Potential Customers
If the only market segmenting that you do is to separate those who have bought from those who have not bought, do it. The moment a prospect becomes a customer, their marketing messages should be very different from those who have not become actual customers yet. This will increase satisfaction among list subscribers, as well as increase sales because the messages you send each audience is totally different. You don’t want to send messages to people about products they have already purchased. And you can do more for your customers – like VIP days – if you have a way to email them and let them know.
Another Option: Separate Openers from Those Who Don’t Open
It can be really frustrating to send out emails to people who never open them. So, why not separate people who open your emails to read them, from those who don’t. Maybe the ones who are not opening need a more forceful or different subject line approach. By separating them, you’ll be able to focus your marketing messages differently for each group. It’s likely you’ll end up with more and more openers by better focusing your messages to each group. Email programs can detect, most of the time, when an email has been opened, so you can read in your stats about how many opened the message. If you are resending because you are doing A/B Testing, then you are also segmenting there too.
Separate Subscribers into Different Product Categories
If you sell more than one product or service, you might want to further segment your market by putting those who have bought product A and B into one list, while those who have only bought A into another list. If you can focus those who have bought A toward buying B, then those who have bought both A and B into buying C, you’ll see an increase in sales due to the more personalized marketing messages you can send. This works for the digital marketplace, but you could also segment based on location if you have more than one store. You could have people on a different list based on where they shop, and are able to personalize sales and other messages to them.
Get Rid of the Freeloaders
Through segmentation you can keep your list a lot cleaner. If you see a pattern of those who never open anything also happened to be the ones who downloaded the free eReport, then you know your eReport is not targeted exclusively enough toward your target audience. You can do two things to fix this. Clean those people off your list, then redo your free offer to be more relevant to only your target audience. You pay for those people, even if they don’t open the emails, and it’s best to have a responsive list of people who read what you have to say!
By segmenting you are going to be more aware of who the responders are, as opposed to the freeloaders. Segmenting will make your business more profitable than you ever thought possible.
What are your thoughts about segmenting your business? How have you seen it done before?
An Email List Is A Valuable Asset