Digital marketers have long known that email is a reliable channel for connecting with their business’ prospects and consumers.
And it’s no surprise why. Building and sustaining a strong email marketing strategy goes a long way to converting new leads into loyal consumers.
In order to drive conversions and boost revenue, you have to make intentional efforts to retain the email subscriber base you’re cultivating.
This is where segmenting your email list comes into play.
Audience segmentation allows for specification, which is critical for any type of outreach.
By taking the time to get to know your audience — whether through Voice-of-Customer research, engagement analytics, or SEO audits — you get to know their preferences, pain points, and hesitations.
The data that you collect informs how you market to prospects and consumers. And as a result, you set yourself up for a more successful email campaign.
Though it might seem easier to create and distribute one version of an email to the hundreds or thousands of recipients, it’s unlikely that this approach will improve your open rates or click-through rates.
In fact, we know that this approach doesn’t work.
Segmenting your email list allows you to target groups of subscribers who have something in common. This enables you to personalize your email copy to each specific group.
Despite the fact that personalized emails generate six times higher transaction rates than generic emails, the majority of brands (70%) aren’t tapping into this potential effectively.
This article details the benefits of audience segmentation for email marketers and how you can personalize your messaging to engage and convert more subscribers.
The More Targeted, The More Effective
Marketers that segment their email campaigns have reported seeing a 14.37% increase in open rates and 64.78% increase in clicks than those who don’t segment their campaigns.
Managing and maintaining a consistent channel of communication with different audience segments is not an easy feat for any marketing team. Even still, the added time and effort you invest will pay off in the long-term.
Segmenting an email list is a subjective, flexible process. You may choose to prioritize certain segment types depending on your understanding of your audience while a different marketer might take the opposite approach.
In the section that follows, we outline several options that you might consider when segmenting your email list.
Defining Your Audience Segments
Level of Engagement
The engagement analytics gathered by your email service provider is a great resource for you to refer to during the email segmenting process.
Within seconds, you can access data that shows which recipients engage frequently or infrequently with your emails. This is most often reflected in subscribers’ open rates.
By identifying the subscribers who are constantly engaged and those who aren’t, you can segment your email list and personalize the copy to better appeal to both groups.
Amount of Time Subscribed
Another effective way to segment your audience is to account for how long each recipient has been a subscriber.
For new subscribers, you can personalize the email copy to welcome them as a subscriber and let them know what they can expect from you. The aim here is to incentivize them to remain subscribed to your email list, so it’s a smart idea to share what type of content (and how often) they will see going forward.
For loyal subscribers, personalizing the email copy helps you maintain their trust and keep them engaged for years to come. You might also offer exclusive deals and early access to products or services as a way to incentivize this subscriber segment to remain subscribed.
Audience Preferences
An underutilized — but highly effective — segmentation strategy is to directly ask your subscribers what they prefer.
Low engagement and open rates may be a sign that certain subscribers are receiving too many emails in a short duration of time. Or it may be a sign that, while they are interested in your business, they are receiving emails that don’t relate to their interests.
The best way to find the root cause of the issue is to take initiative to ask your audience.
Getting your subscribers to choose which type of emails or topics they want to receive makes them more likely to engage with your content rather than unsubscribe.
Refine Your Email Marketing Strategy
Through segmenting your email list, you’re able to communicate more effectively with your audience by sharing relevant information and incentivizing them to make a purchase.
To further refine your email marketing strategy, we recommend conducting regular A/B tests of the email copy that you share with each segmented group.
Defining the audience segments helps you personalize your messaging, but testing this messaging allows you to determine if an audience segment prefers one type of email copy to another.
By tracking the engagement analytics from different versions of email copy, you can ensure that the messaging is as personalized to your subscribers as possible.
About the Author:
Mackenzie Scott is a copywriter with Soundstripe, a music licensing and stock media company. From royalty free classical music to stock video, Soundstripe provides creators with the resources they need for video and podcast production.
