Segmenting email lists isn’t just about increasing open rates, click-throughs, and conversions. Are those all great things to achieve with email? Sure. But, your primary goal with emails, just like all marketing messages, should be to add value to your customers. If you’re not segmenting lists or only segmenting them to hit high open rates, then you’re doing it wrong. Segmenting users in email marketing is about enhancing the buying experience, creating authentic connections with your audience, and better understanding your audience’s needs.
What is Email Marketing List Segmentation?
What is list segmentation and how do you do it? List segmentation is all about creating lists within your email marketing tool. Lists are groups of contacts that have one or multiple things in common. You could segment lists based on name, location, email host, income, or any other information you’ve captured about the user. How do you do it? Most email marketing tools make it fairly simple to create lists based on triggered events or you can build a custom list manually by adding users to it. Setting up an automated trigger allows the list to build over time as you collect information about users.
Why Segment Email Marketing Lists?
We’ve already talked about the elephant in the room: open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. If these are the only goals you’re interested in, then it’s time to rethink your email marketing strategy. You need to be more concerned about audience perception, user experience, and adding value to the conversation. Those other things (open rates, click-through rates, and conversions) are byproducts of segmenting your email marketing.
Enhancing the buying experience through email segmentation.
Not everyone who lands on your site is at the same stage of the customer journey. Someone might just be learning about your brand. Someone else may be ⅔ of the way through the buy process. Still, someone else may be a returning customer looking to make an additional purchase. By understanding where someone is on their journey, you can enhance their buying experience.
But, how do you know where they are at on their journey?
A robust email marketing tool and system will allow you to track the user’s journey in multiple ways. For instance, you can create forms that allow users to input their name, email address, and whatever other information you may want to build lists from. By doing this you can then track the user as they move about your site. Not to mention, by filling out a form on your site, the user will become a contact in your system that you’ll be able to track.
By tracking the life of the contact, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of where they are on the customer journey. This deeper understanding will allow you to target messaging that caters to their needs, the benefits they’re looking for, and eventually help you convert them into a customer.
Creating authentic connections.
Email marketing is about connecting with your audience. Sending a coupon to a targeted list is a good way to get them to buy something, but the messaging in the email has to resonate with the user before they’ll even think about using the coupon. If you’re just sending the coupon out of a desperate need to make a sale, then your connection won’t be authentic.
Email segmentation is all about sending the right message at the right time. A member of one list won’t appreciate the same message as someone from another list. Your tone of voice and personality has to shift just slightly to reach different audiences. By segmenting your list, you’ll be able to craft messages that resonate with individual audience groups.
Creating these authentic connections will lead to more opens because your lists will actually connect with the emails that you’re sending.
Understanding your audience’s needs.
Perhaps one of the biggest reasons you need to be segmenting your email marketing lists is because it shows you understand your audience’s needs. Why does that matter? Because understanding your audience’s needs is the first step in creating a successful marketing plan.
When you understand your audience, what they’re looking for, what their pain points are, and how you can actually help them, then you can start connecting with them. Email marketing tools should allow you to gain insights into your customers that make connecting with them easier. From there, you’ll be able to start working on improving open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
Ready to get started on your email marketing?
At Iconic Digital, we love diving into email marketing analytics and building a strategy for reaching audiences. We’ll start by understanding your audience and move to building lists that help us generate the best experiences.
What are you waiting for? Let’s talk!