Cansu Dilek, Author at Segmentify

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Ever since Ray Tomlinson sent the first email in 1971, email marketing has been a thing. Decades have passed; email marketing has evolved.

People receive many emails daily, and most are not even directly relevant to them. With the right email marketing segmentation strategy, you’ll send the most relevant email to the most relevant audience, uplifting your conversion rates.

Let’s start learning email marketing segmentation and how to create the right segmentation strategy for your business!

What is Email Marketing Segmentation?

By using predetermined criteria, email subscribers are divided into smaller categories through segmentation. Here are the types of segmentation:

Demographic Segmentation

A comprehensive method of identifying an audience is known as demographic segmentation. It is based on age, gender, marital status, family size, income, education level, race, occupation, nationality and religion.

Behavioural Segmentation

Behavioural segmentation is when buyers are divided into groups based on their knowledge, attitude, uses, or responses to a product. Many marketers believe behaviour variables are the best starting point for building market segments.

Firmographic Segmentation

Firmographic Segmentation is the classification of B2B customers based on variables such as the number of employees, financial performance and business description.

Geographic Segmentation

Geographic Segmentation calls for dividing the market into different geographical units such as nations, states, regions, counties, cities or neighbourhoods. A company may decide to operate in one or a few geographical areas or cover everywhere. In the latter case, it must consider geographical differences in needs and wants. Many companies regionalise their products, advertising, promotion and sales efforts.

Why Should You Segment Your Email List?

Higher Open Rates

The relevance of an email to the recipient is one of the most crucial considerations when deciding whether or not to open it.Segmenting your email list is an important way to make your communications more relevant.

Higher Click-Through Rates (CTRs)

The number of individuals that clicked on a hyperlink, call-to-action (CTA), or picture inside the body of your email is known as the “click-through rate” or “email click rate.” CTR is a useful measure of how much of your audience is interested in your content over time because it displays the proportion of subscribers that clicked on your email.

Email segmentation is a great way to increase click-through rates. By segmenting your email list, you will send relevant emails to the designated audience, meaning they are more likely to click the email content.

Improved Deliverability

Deliverability of emails refers to their ability to reach subscribers’ inboxes. It is what some marketers use to estimate the chance that their email messages will get into their subscribers’ inboxes, taking into account actual delivery factors like ISPs, throttling, bounces, spam problems, and bulking.

Sending without custom authentication, utilising a single opt-in, sending from a free domain email address, making it challenging to unsubscribe, employing URL shorteners, and a lack of interaction are all factors that reduce deliverability.

Based on the information, the receiving server returns an error message, and email service providers that handle delivery provide an explanation of why the message was bounced.

Increased Engagement

The segmentation of your lists through email interaction is crucial. It may significantly affect the outcome. You may send more specifically targeted follow-ups if you know how someone has previously interacted with your material.

Segmenting by email engagement occurs when you send particular emails to someone based on whether they have opened or clicked on earlier sends. You can contact anyone who opened or did not open a prior bulletin you issued using the “Opened” option. Like “Visited,” “Recipients” depends on whether a receiver clicked a link in an earlier bulletin you issued.

You will start to see higher engagement numbers on your bulletin detail reports after you concentrate on subscribers who interact with your material and connect with them more purposefully.

Higher Return on Investment (ROI)

Of all marketing strategies, email gives the most significant and quantifiable Return on Investment. And email segmentation is a great way to boost ROI.

Through email marketing, businesses may use customer relationship management, or CRM, to develop more individualised and precisely targeted consumer messaging. Customers are reached through email marketing in their inboxes, where they spend a lot of time daily.

Create an Email Marketing Segmentation Strategy in 5 Steps

1. Define Your Goals

Before building your email marketing strategy, you need to define your goals. Whether increasing CTRs or encouraging purchases, the segmentation strategy will differ depending on the goal.

2. Research Your Target Audience

The second step for email marketing segmentation is to research your audience and know them and their background. By analysing your audience, you will be able to segment your emails depending on their location, gender, age etc. This way, your emails will go to the most relevant people and have a higher conversion rate with your email marketing campaign.

By segmenting your email list, you will get the most out of your email marketing campaign and increase conversion rates.

3. Create Buyer Personas

An excellent way to segment your audience is to create buyer personas. Buyer personas are not necessarily divided by age, income, or location, but they are divided depending on their past purchases, spending and buying habits.

4. Analyse Customer Data

After creating buyer personas, you are ready to send the relevant emails to the target audience. After sending the emails, it is important to analyse the campaign’s outcome to see if any changes are necessary.

5. Test and Iterate

It’s crucial to track and comprehend the effects of your emails if you want to assess how well your existing email marketing efforts are doing. It helps maximise open rates and CTRs and lets you choose whether to make a change.

A/B testing is necessary to analyse your email marketing campaign and decide whether to continue or switch to another one.

Wrapping Up

As a result, email marketing segmentation is one of the most necessary steps to take during your email marketing strategy planning. People receive thousands of emails, but wouldn’t you want your email to get the attention of your target audience?

Having flashing images and engaging subject lines do help, but the most important thing is the content of your email. Your audience will be more likely to engage with your email, if the content is relevant.

An age-old strategy, email marketing continues to be a popular tool among digital marketers, as it is an effective way to convert prospects into customers. If used properly, it can generate a substantial return on investment (ROI). However, when used inefficiently, email marketing can be a waste of time and resources.

The success of email marketing strategies relies heavily on the execution, the quality of the leads and email list, and many other factors, making it imperative to meticulously optimise your email campaigns for maximum efficiency.

1. Ensure Your Email List is High-Quality and Targeted

A list of email addresses to whom you may send emails is the first thing a marketer would want to begin their email marketing campaign. Usually, the persons on this list of emails have permitted you to send them emails. This list can also be referred to as the subscribers’ list because these are the persons who have subscribed.

Having a high-quality and targeted email list is beneficial for email optimisation. You would want your email list to be the most relevant people. Rather than having a high number of emails, it is better to have a targeted email list with lower numbers.

Building an email list is crucial since it enables direct communication with your audience. These individuals are reachable by email since they have expressed interest in your material by subscribing. Therefore, be sure to maximise the use of your email list.

2. Keep Your Emails Short, Sweet and To the Point

Keeping emails short and sweet is a well-known marketing tip since people don’t read emails word for word but skim through them. Hence, you would want your audience to get to the point by skimming through in a couple of seconds.

Concentrating on one main topic is better than giving loads of information. Keep the message brief and try to avoid addressing too many themes. Make the most of your brief period of the reader’s attention by creating a compelling call to action.

Since readers only skim through emails, keep body copy to brief paragraphs that are yet legible, ideally under 60 characters. We recommend using only a few images to emphasise your points because they are frequently more straightforward to comprehend than words.

3. Use Strong Call-to-Actions (CTA) in Your Emails

A CTA’s purpose is to motivate customers to take action. An email marketing call-to-action is a button or line of text that links to a brand’s preferred website. As previously mentioned, emails are a great way to contact the reader directly. Therefore, sending a call-to-action email would have a higher chance of motivating the customer to take action than other marketing methods.

4. Personalise Your Emails As Much As Possible

Personalised emails have greater open rates. Additionally, to provide a better-customised experience, 83% of consumers are eager to disclose their data. There is a broad range of personalisation techniques available.

In email marketing, personalisation is tailoring your messages to groups of particular clients and communicating with them in a personalised way. It may include the user’s name in the subject line, a discount offer on a specific group of goods they have previously purchased, or a recommendation that they visit a store close to where they are.

The primary personalised email marketing methods include having the customers’ names on the greetings part of the email. People like seeing and hearing their names; therefore, this action would make the customer feel special.

From the subject line to the email body, the content of the email and imagery can all be personalised according to the specific customer. The best-personalised emails are prepared when a proper customer segmentation is made.

5. A/B Test Your Email Subject Lines, CTAs, and Other Elements

A strong subject line is the most straightforward approach to increasing your open rate because it is the first thing your contacts see when you send them an email. A/B testing allows you to compare two subject lines to ensure you’re constantly giving your audience the most potent one.

A/B testing allows you to assess how version A of something—for example, your email subject line—performs compared to version B among an audience—for example, your contact list.

Simple A/B tests include sending out various subject lines to see which one gets more opens. In contrast, more sophisticated A/B tests involve comparing different email templates to see which gets more click-throughs. A/B tests can range in complexity.

6. Make Your Emails Mobile-Friendly

People in today’s society are continually scurrying about due to their hectic schedules. As a result, they frequently use their mobile phones to check 90% of their emails. Therefore, it is essential to use responsive design while creating an email.

On the phone, emails are sent differently, occasionally resulting in their destruction before they even load. This can be avoided, though, and with a bit of forward preparation, you can make your emails as entertaining to read on a phone as they would be on a laptop screen.

While creating an email marketing design, it is necessary to have a mobile-friendly version to get the attention of mobile users.

7. Use Engaging Images in Your Emails

In addition to your email’s context and written content, the visuals are essential to get your message across and call for action. Visuals have a better probability of capturing attention than text does. It İs normal for individuals to pay attention to an image initially, but only if it grabs their interest. They can then read the contents of your email.

Images that are powerful and pertinent come into play here. Email marketing is booming, but you must be able to attract attention and motivate recipients to take action.

8. Take Advantage of Email Automation

Preparing and sending an email to every customer will be tiring and challenging. Therefore, many companies have decided to automate the email marketing process.

Email automation is using a marketing automation platform to deliver automated communications. Email automation eliminates time-consuming activities from your to-do list, giving you more time for essential tasks like answering client inquiries. Sending automated emails, especially after purchasing a product, will increase your customer trust.

Though this seems like a perfect solution, some automated emails might go to the spam folder. Therefore, it is crucial to prepare high-quality emails and avoid using spam words.

9. Use Segmentation to Send More Targeted Emails

By using predetermined criteria, email subscribers are divided into smaller categories through segmentation. Segmentation is typically used as a customisation strategy to offer more pertinent email marketing to subscribers based on their geography, interests, past purchases, and a variety of other factors. Instead of sending a single mass message to everyone, segments are made so that the marketer may particularly cater to each unique email list and that list’s independent interests.

When personalisation and segmentation of emails are used together, the best-optimised email marketing statistics are likely to occur.

10. Keep an Eye on Your Email Metrics and Constantly Strive to Improve Them

Email Marketing KPIs, key performance indicators, are indicators of how well specific components of an email campaign are doing. You need to keep track of the rates at which the audience is consuming your content to improve your strategy. It’s important to keep an eye on every component of a campaign, even if most marketers look at their campaigns holistically. This might help you observe minute changes in consumer behaviour.

KPIs such as open rate, click-through rate (CTR), conversation rate and revenue per email are necessary indicators to better understand your campaign’s results.

Content can be prepared perfectly; however, it is useful when there are results. The best way to understand the results is via statistics.

Wrapping Up

Since emails build a one-to-one connection with the customer, they are more likely to be motivated to execute the action. As a result, email marketing can give high conversion rates if implemented correctly.

You think you know everything about your customers when you gather all the data that you can. But what if you don’t actually know them that well, and the data you collected is “Bad Data”?

The Problem with Personalisation

Bad data is any inaccurate or missing information regarding customers, goods, or stores that can negatively affect customers’ shopping experiences and the profitability of an eCommerce company. Wrong phone numbers, improper email addresses, or inaccurate postal mailing addresses are bad data examples.

eCommerce is a rapidly changing industry, with incredible advances in machine learning and AI changing the game constantly. In addition, customers have a growing expectation for immediate satisfaction and expect digital services to streamline the online shopping experience. That all makes for one harsh industry to succeed in. Remaining agile is key.

People may visit a site to book a jungle safari holiday with your company once, but that doesn’t mean they want to be inundated with offers for more jungle safari packages every time they visit your site. Offering outdated recommendations based on older data will only frustrate the customer, with 95% of customers likely to leave your site if they get poor search results.

What is Outdated Data?

The data regarding your customers is always evolving. It constantly has to be gathered, transformed, and updated. Additionally, each stage in the data lifecycle presents a chance for errors or inadequate procedures to reduce the data quality.

Therefore, the fight against bad data quality is never-ending. However, you’ll have a solid foundation for high-quality data by being aware of these probable reasons and using the appropriate technical assistance.

What is Inadequate Data?

To understand what our customers want precisely, we must know where they are coming from when they arrive on our site. This requires greater insight than their on-site behaviours.

You must have clear access to the channels they are referred from, including information on:

When we look at the data recorded by analytics programs, two complementary analytics metrics let us know more about a buyer’s journey: Click data and engagement data.

These are often confused. Although click data tells companies what pages on their website are performing well, it is difficult to know what the customers are really interested in without the engagement data.

Having inadequate data that limits the insights on the customer makes it harder to offer relevant product recommendations. Many eCommerce companies overlook the value of this non-click behavioural data, which means their efforts for eCommerce personalisation are hampered by only having part of the picture.

What is Bad Data?

Unreliable data sources can be caused by human error with manual data entry. These errors might range from a typo to an entire entry being overlooked. A person might accidentally enter information in the incorrect field. Therefore, it is essential to automate data entry and try to stay away from manual data entry.

Another point that causes bad data is biassed data. Omitted variable bias occurs when vital characteristics that affect the result are absent from the data. Typically, this happens when important qualities are not accessible to the mechanism recording the data or when data production depends on human input.

In addition to errors, a lack of a common understanding of how the data should be gathered, converted, stored, or displayed is another reason for poor data quality. The meaning of each entry can be ambiguous. But due to the unusual admission procedures, they won’t be grouped together. Therefore, you must establish and maintain company-wide standards to prevent concerns with consistency. Better to programme your automation tool to detect inconsistent data entries and update them automatically.

Examples of Bad Data in eCommerce Personalisation

An example of bad data would be customer contact information, such as email addresses or phone numbers, that have changed. When the customer information is changed and the database hasn’t updated it, the personalised recommendations can be irrelevant.

Another example can be that customer preferences or interests have changed over time or the purchase history can no longer be relevant or accurate. In this case, websites should always update their customers’ previously clicked items and update it accordingly.

Impact of Outdated Data on eCommerce

The impact of outdated data can lead to irrelevant or ineffective personalised recommendations and experiences. Customers would not get relevant items recommended which would not make them satisfied and decrease loyalty with the eCommerce website.

Furthermore, outdated data can also negatively impact data analytics and reporting. When analysing customer lifetime value, the value might have changed overtime due to outdated data and the website becoming irrelevant to the customer.

How to Keep Your eCommerce Personalisation Relevant

Use Multiple Data Sources

Using multiple data sources to check the quality of your data is essential. In addition, always save your data sources as well. To have good data analysis skills, you should first question the data and use clean data for the best results.

Use Data Validation and Cleansing Tools

The automation of validation and cleansing tools is necessary to avoid bad data. Maintain ongoing reviews of fresh sources while confirming the accuracy of the product information. In addition to the supplier’s requirements, search for other sources of information for this purpose. These can contain descriptions of products comparable to those you currently own or even web pages for different online retailers.

Use Real-Time Data

Companies must understand the needs of their customers in the moment and respond to their behaviours to make real-time recommendations. The more data you acquire and analyse, the more accurate you will get with your real-time recommendations. And personalisation increases the chances of conversion by 75%. For successful eCommerce personalisation, your company must have a recommendation engine that instantly recognises visitors. It also must be able to serve up personalised product recommendations that the customer still wants.

A/B Test Your Personalisation

The best way to double-check your data is A/B testing your personalisation. Running A/B tests can be done on the same segments or different segments. There are many different types of segmentation, ranging from simple demographic segmentation utilising factors like age and gender to more complex differentials like purpose and life cycle stage. This way, you will always be checking your data inside your website.

Keep Your Personalisation Up-to-Date

If your personalisation engine continuously collects and memorises visitor data, your personalised product recommendations for each visitor will become more accurate over time. As it gathers data, the algorithms will get more competent and boost revenues by 20% or more.

By putting the customers in focus and analysing their behaviours on the site, eCommerce companies can learn a lot about how to serve their customers. The more data you gather, the more refined and accurate your service will become.

Wrapping Up

Understanding your customer is crucial for an eCommerce business to grow. Companies can further understand their customers’ needs, wants and behaviours by collecting relevant data. However, it is essential to have clean and real-time data whilst analysing the collected data.
The Real-Time Conversion Analytics tool by Segmentify is a great way to keep track of your customers’ behaviour and analyse their data. You can book a free trial to try out Segmentify’s personalised solutions to get ahead of the competition.

Valentine’s Day is a special day celebrated in many countries on February 14 of every year. In 2023, Valentine’s Day will be celebrated on a Tuesday. Almost everyone gives gifts to their significant others that integrate with the spirit of this day and express their love. Flowers and chocolate are the forerunners of these gifts. And before we dive into our list of great Valentine’s Day marketing tips for eCommerce, we recommend putting on this specially curated playlist to accompany your reading.

With the growth of eCommerce, many businesses tailor their websites according to this special day. For example, Valentine’s Day 2022 saw $23.9B spent on gifts for partners, friends, pets and more. Here are the top 11 tips for eCommerce stores to implement to increase sales and the time spent on the website.

Key Takeaways

Download: Valentine’s Day Marketing Playbook 2023 💌

Download the Valentine’s Day Playbook & learn the sweetest solutions to a delightful Valentine’s Day filled with sales! Know your customers beforehand and woo them in the best way!

11 eCommerce Marketing Tips for Valentine’s Day 2023

1. Use the colours red and pink on your landing page

When we think about Valentine’s Day, the top two colours are red and pink. Red is the colour of love, and eCommerce stores should use red and pink tones to remind customers about Valentine’s Day. Here are examples of what can be implemented regarding colours and shapes:

Creating a red and pink page with heart shapes will remind website visitors about Valentine’s Day. Even if the words “Valentine’s Day” is not used explicitly, this will subconsciously bring this day to mind.

2. Remind customers of Valentine’s Day

On average, people spend two weeks planning Valentine’s Day activities and picking and buying Valentine’s Day gifts. Therefore, eCommerce websites should start their Valentine’s Day promotions in the last week of January to meet the customer’s timetables and deadlines.

3. Offer unique promotions and coupons

Many seasons throughout the year encourage people to buy products: Black Friday, Christmas, the beginning of spring, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays, anniversaries etc. Unfortunately, consumers get confused about these dates or sometimes need a reason to buy products on this specific day.

Therefore, offering unique promotions and coupons is the best encouragement. The coupon doesn’t necessarily need to be of high value; however, a unique personalised coupon will make the customer feel special. Even if the customer does not have a significant other for Valentine’s Day, they will buy something to use the coupon.

4. Add Personalised Recommendation Widgets on Landing Pages and Search Areas

People spend more money on gifts to others than on products they buy for themselves. So whilst Valentine’s Day products may not be requirements for people, they enjoy giving presents and making people happy.

A meaningful way to remind customers about Valentine’s Day is to display Valentine’s Day-related products on the landing page so that people become aware of the upcoming day and think of buying the options.

eCommerce websites can pin Valentine’s Day products for visitors so that they are reminded of Valentine’s Day every time they click the website. Also, websites can pin Valentine’s Day products to their search results and other most-clicked pages to induce sales.

5. Offer Fast Delivery and Delivery Before Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is celebrated on February 14 yearly and is a one-day annual event. People start searching for Valentine’s Day gifts at the beginning of February, meaning they have two weeks to get the gift.

Since Valentine’s Day gifts are intended for someone else, people put in extra effort and care. Offering fast delivery will make the customer use your website because they will have more time to check the gift and return it if they are not happy with it and buy a new one.

Delivery after Valentine’s Day for a Valentine’s Day gift is a dead offering and will not make the customer buy the product. Therefore, eCommerce stores should partner with fast delivery services and deliver products before Valentine’s Day. Do not forget that since this is a timely matter, people will be open to spending more for faster delivery.

Another point is to think about the last-minute gift shoppers. eCommerce websites should also include options for people searching for gifts a few days before and even during Valentine’s Day. Whilst, you may not be able to send all your products that fast, it is good to have a few items that can be delivered in an ultra-fast way. Or even offering gifts online will also be helpful for a last-minute gift shopper.

6. Prepare Gift Guides

Finding the perfect gift for Valentine’s can be stressful at times. The most sold products for Valentine’s Day include:

This list goes on and on. However, people still struggle to find a Valentine’s Day gift for their significant other. eCommerce websites should add a gift guide section to ease the customers’ search process. In addition, you can send information regarding the gift guides via email and push notifications.

7. Offer Gift Wrapping Services

As mentioned above, gift packages are one of the most popular Valentine’s Day gift options. Hence, eCommerce stores must offer gift package options to help the customers with another task: gift wrapping

Most eCommerce websites do not offer the services mentioned above, so offering them would make your website more desirable. Even though customers can find the exact products from different websites, they will choose your website due to gift packages, gift receipts, and gift card options.

8. Recommend Bought Together Items

Gift boxes are one of the most popular gift options for Valentine’s Day; therefore, rather than buying just one gift, people buy several small gifts in a box and give them to their intended significant other.

Sometimes only buying chocolate, flowers, or some other gift may seem small, and people want to make it more personalised by picking the gifts for the gift box. Offering options such as choosing between small products and adding them to the gift box is an excellent idea for the buyer to personalise it according to their desire. Another way is to offer already-made gift boxes to ease the customer’s buying process.

With Dynamic Bundles you can recommend items that are complementary to each other and help your customers build their gift packages.

9. Romanticise Your Marketing Campaign

Valentine’s Day is known to be the most romantic day of the year. Loved ones come together and celebrate their love. Therefore, any product can be romanticised even if your eCommerce company does not sell gift items.

Using elements of nostalgia to remind your customers about the past and how it used to be.

10. Collaborate with Other Businesses or Influencers

It’s always better when Valentine’s Day is celebrated together. This is a great way to collaborate with companies so that you can reach out to new audiences.

Creating a specific product for Valentine’s Day with another company’s partnership would attract attention. In addition, this product can have a unique package and campaign name to be memorable.

Collaboration with other businesses does not have to mean that you prepare a product together. With another company for Valentine’s Day, you can donate to relevant charities and present it on your website.

Additionally, Valentine’s Day is a great day to collaborate with influencers, mostly couples influencers, to showcase your products and their usage with couples.

11. Don’t Forget Single People (and Other Customer Segments)

Finally, eCommerce businesses should know that Valentine’s Day is not necessarily promoted to people with significant others. According to the National Retail Federation, here are the ratio of Valentine’s Day gifts and their intended receivers:

Whilst 45% of Americans stated that they would not participate in Valentine’s Day, however, 29% of these anti-Valentine’s planned to mark the occasion in some way:

Therefore, appealing to all customer segments is doable by eCommerce stores. Websites can include gifts regarding:

Finally, 11% of Anti-Valentines stated that they would be treating themselves for this day; therefore, adding a section for single people would also be helpful to increase retention for this date.

Wrapping Up

Valentine’s Day is a huge day for marketing, and by using the aforementioned tips and tricks, eCommerce stores will be able to make the best out of it. You can schedule a demo with one of our eCommerce experts to learn more about what Segmentify can do for your eCommerce store, not just for Valentine’s Day but all year long.

Would you want your visitors to find exactly what they are looking for on your website as easily and quickly as possible?

There comes the importance of user experience (UX). By providing the best search experience, you will have satisfied customers, they will find whatever they are looking for in a short time, and the website will be easily accessible. This may seem like a dream; however, it is possible to accomplish with UX optimisation.

Key Takeaways

How Can UX Help with Search?

Understanding User Intent

Without a doubt, one of the most crucial qualities for a UX expert is understanding their visitors. However, there is a subtle but significant obstacle to incorporating empathy into the design, and it has to do with how we view the user.

UX professionals are able to understand user intent by checking rankings, search volumes, organic traffic levels, and on-site conversions. While exhaustive users may have a broader scope around a particular topic or theme, specialised people may have a narrower search intent and don’t stray from this.

Search engines are also improving their comprehension of the two types of search intent. Just two of these include Yandex’s Korolyov and Vega and Google’s Hummingbird.

Creating a Positive User Experience

With UX professionals, eCommerce websites can create a positive user experience. When potential customers enter a physical store, salespeople guide them and help them find what they are looking for. This can be translated into personalisation tools assisting visitors in finding what they need.

Personalisation of the search function helps create a better search experience with fast and easy results. Just like how people enjoy having personal treatment at physical stores, they enjoy having personalised products and content shown to them.

To summarise, personalising the search function depending on the previously gathered data from the visitors would increase customer satisfaction and, therefore, the conversation rates.

Improving the Findability of Content

Another point where UX helps websites is by improving the findability of content. The search tool on your website functions as a mini search engine like Google, allowing users to look up specific products.

Customers often quit your site if they can’t find what they’re looking for utilising the search function. For this reason, eCommerce search UX is a wonderful place to start if you want to enhance on-site findability.

Effective content organisation is the practice of information architecture. For eCommerce, this means that product categories and navigation should meet user expectations. When consumers encounter content, advertisements, and promotions unrelated to their interests, they become irritated. Following the UX design concepts to deliver pertinent content throughout would help increase customer satisfaction.

How to Optimise Your UX for Search?

1. Design for Discovery

Having a simple design for eCommerce websites is so underrated these days. The benefits of a basic, straightforward and to-the-point website are undeniable. Keeping the search function simple is the best way to satisfy your visitors with their search experience.

2. Use Typography and Whitespace to Your Advantage

Whitespace is one of the quickest and simplest methods to improve a website’s design. Whitespace, even in small amounts, will give your designs breathing room and a polished appearance.

It’s not required for the design background to always be white. It merely needs to be the white space between website items. Your web pages will look more elegant and simple with white space.

3. Use Visuals to Guide the Eye

A visually distinctive website layout is one of the most critical objectives for UX designers. It is a method for maintaining a flexible user experience and interesting user path.

In short, make it simple for users to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for on your pages. Straightforward navigation on the eCommerce website or app would increase customer engagement substantially.

The search area must stand out visually, ideally with the word search and a glass icon as the placeholder text. Many UX experts prefer having the search bar typically at the top right corner.

Furthermore, eye-friendly design and text legibility are key for website experience satisfaction. The colours you choose and the contrast between the colour of your text and the background significantly impact how easy it is to read the text.

4. Keep it Simple

A clean layout, a colour scheme of two or three, lots of white space, an average of two typefaces, and one additional font for your logo are all characteristics of simplicity. A picture says a thousand words; however, images should also be limited. Your graphics need to have a function to be clickable and valuable.

5. Consider the User’s Needs

The most crucial topic that eCommerce managers should study is their customers. It is necessary to know their target market, demographics and needs. Asking for your visitors’ feedback is a great way to improve your website. This can be done in several ways, including emailing them, having pop-up surveys or asking them to fill up a form at the end of their purchase or exit from the website.

Wrapping Up

Don’t forget that your eCommerce website is the middleman between the product and the customer. The website is there to make the customers’ lives easier. Why not provide them with the best customer experience?

Personalisation is the best way to increase customer satisfaction and give them special treatment. Of course, in addition to personalisation, there are many other factors that eCommerce specialists should consider. These include having a straightforward website, including the right amount of pictures, SEO and understanding customer needs and behaviour.

Contact Segmentify to learn more about making your search function fully personalised and increasing customer satisfaction!

If you have a business, it doesn’t matter if it’s big or small, the first marketing step you take is email marketing. And this is great because email marketing is proven to be highly effective.

However, there are many KPIs that you should consider to optimise your email marketing campaigns, which we’ll be discussing at length in this article. But before we go any further, you might want to educate yourself further on why you need email personalisation to get the most out of your marketing plan.

Why KPIs Matter for Email Marketing

What is a KPI?

KPIs, key performance indicators, are indicators of how well specific components of an email campaign are doing. You may gather a variety of information by monitoring your email KPIs. Most of the time, you’ll want to know who views your marketing emails or passes them to other contacts. These measurements won’t actually demonstrate the efficacy of your whole plan.

You should identify subscriber patterns to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign and adjust your strategy as necessary to stay on trend. If a campaign has a different effect, metrics like unsubscribe, click-through, and bounce rates can rapidly show this.

Benefits of Tracking KPIs

You won’t be able to refine your plan if you’re not monitoring the rates at which users consume your material. While most marketers will examine their efforts holistically, monitoring each element can help you spot subtle changes in consumer habits.

11 Essential KPIs for Email Marketing

1. Open Rate

Open rate is the percentage of email recipients who open a particular email. Most email marketers still go above and beyond to ensure their subject lines are optimised for greater open rates. While this may have a favourable effect, and more openings are always good, they should concentrate on improving their CTRs.

Open rate is a highly deceptive measure for a number of reasons. Most significantly, an email is only considered “opened” if the receiver also receives any attached photos. Additionally, many of your email subscribers probably have picture blocking turned on in their email programme. This makes your open rate an incorrect and untrustworthy indicator since even if they open the email, they won’t be counted in it.

2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is defined as the percentage of recipients clicking on any email links. For example, if you send 1000 emails and get 40 clicks, the CTR would be 4%.

The CTR allows you to calculate the results of every email sent. It is instrumental in A/B testing, enabling marketers to determine what links work best. Setting a KPI based on this metric significantly improves your call-to-action (CTA) writing.

3. Unsubscribe Rate

The ratio of unsubscribed emails to all emails sent over a specific period is known as the unsubscribe rate. Many marketers perceive high email unsubscribe rates negatively, yet they can also be beneficial. An unsubscription just serves as a sign of how your email subscribers interact with your email marketing.

A link to unsubscribe is a requirement for all marketing emails, and when email marketing initiatives result in high unsubscribe rates, it’s time to revise your approach. Nobody wants to invest their time in email marketing to a list that will not provide high email open rates or effective click-through rates. To maintain the effectiveness of your email marketing plan, having a significant number of unsubscribes is beneficial.

4. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the ratio of recipients who answered your CTA and then took the desired action. This could be anything from filling out a survey or downloading an eBook to visiting your eCommerce store to make a purchase.

eCommerce personalisation can majorly impact this metric, with personalised emails boosting open rates by more than 40%, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.

5. Revenue per Email

Revenue per email is a crucial KPI since it tells marketers, eCommerce companies, and salespeople how successful their email marketing efforts are. Additionally, many marketers utilise this measure to assess how well they are using their budget. Importantly, it also enables them to set objectives and compare performance to similar companies in the same sector.

6. List Growth Rate

The indicator to monitor your list’s growth rate is the list growth rate. To figure this out, divide the sum of your list’s email addresses by the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes, then multiply the result by 100.

7. Bounce Rate

There are over 4 billion email addresses today, with many people having more than one. Unsurprisingly, not all of them are active. Who among us has never abandoned ship when the flood of subscriptions and junk mail gets too much?

The problem this creates for email marketers is that their emails may not be able to reach the recipient’s inbox. This percentage is known as the bounce rate, of which there are two different types:

8. Forwarding Rate

People sharing or forwarding your emails increases your brand exposure and reach. This helps generate new contacts, which grows your list and increases leads. All email marketers can benefit from learning how to persuade people to share their email content. Using the tools in your marketing automation software will show how people spread your email content, acting as a good KPI for audience growth.

9. Social Shares

The social shares KPI shows social media involvement and is a reliable measure of the value of your content. By including social sharing buttons in your emails, you may make it simple for readers to share your material.

It’s unfortunate to see a business that creates impressive content but makes it quite difficult to share. The reader may have to click and go through several submenus if the sole link in the email points to their home page.

10. Spam Complaints

Spam complaints are the percentage of spam rates. It might have a long-term effect on your subsequent efforts in addition to having an immediate influence on your email marketing effectiveness right now.

Because email service providers will start marking your emails as spam if there are too many spam complaints, a high spam complaint rate might dramatically reduce your email deliverability. The average industry has a spam complaint rate of less than 0.01%. Therefore, anything beyond this should raise red flags, indicating that you should optimise your emails for trust.

Businesses should avoid using terms considered spam in their email subject lines. They may need to reduce the number of emails they send out to see if they can minimise the number of spam complaints they receive.

11. Email Return-on-Investment (ROI)

This should be an obvious one. The most straightforward way to determine the success of your email marketing campaigns can be laid out with this calculation:

[(Value of sales from an email campaign – Campaign costs) / Campaign costs] * 100

For example, if your eCommerce store makes an additional $3000 after an email campaign that costs $200, you can calculate the overall ROI as follows:

As email marketing has an average ROI of 400%, it is well worth investing in. Tracking this metric and using it as one of your KPIs will allow you to see just how effective your campaign is.

How to Improve Your Email Marketing KPIs

1. Write Great Subject Lines

Subject lines are the first thing that your subscribers read before opening the whole email. A great subject line is necessary to make the person interested and want to click on the email.

These subject lines shouldn’t be too long and should summarise the whole email. It should be eye-catching and make the person want to learn more about what is to come. Using emojis can be helpful since you can show a facial expression with one emoji; the colours are also eye-catching.

2. Personalise Your Emails

The highest open rate on emails is personalised emails. However, personalising your email does not only mean putting your customer’s name. Personalised email marketing from the beginning to end is essential to make your emails stand out.

When the emails are fully personalised, the reader becomes more involved with your letter because they believe you are writing specifically to them. Your open and click-through rates will increase when you send tailored newsletters. Additionally, it helps increase website traffic and revenue.

3. Keep Your Emails Short and Sweet

Your email should be brief. Cut the material and keep the critical messages near the top of the email because interest in email content decreases as it goes below the fold. By optimising your headlines, you will reach out to more readers to read your whole email. Keep a headline’s opening two words informative since they are the most significant.

Get straight to the point if you want to keep your readers reading your email. Decide if it’s worthwhile to include any drawn-out introductions or pleasantries because most readers will skip them. Avoid including any crucial information in the introduction if it is required.

4. Segment Your List

Email marketers should segment their subscribers’ lists to have more effective outcomes and decrease unsubscribe rates. You may start sending carefully targeted and customised email campaigns by segmenting your email list into smaller groups.

Ask pertinent questions about your sign-ups and utilise this valuable data to categorise your audience. For instance, you may inquire about the person’s location, birthdate, or preferred service category.

5. Testing

Before email testing, you may preview your email to your subscriber list to check for links, typos, and other issues before sending your email to your subscriber list. You may repair incorrect subject lines, “From” names, and preview text, broken photos or missing alt text, irregular font or content display, broken email designs, incorrect or untracked links, broken subject lines, and spelling and grammatical mistakes with testing.

It’s crucial to remember that even though the test email appears fantastic to you, the subscriber’s viewing preferences might make it appear otherwise. To ensure that each email is correctly structured for each recipient, rendering is used in this situation.

6. Post Email Activity

Keeping track of the email activity long after sending them is also essential. An example is when an eCommerce marketer sends a cart abandonment mail, even though that person already knows that they have left something in his cart. They click but never look at their basket; they just wander around the website. This email doesn’t fulfil its purpose technically, but maybe he likes other things and buys them a few days later.

Wrapping Up

As a result, email marketing might seem easy from the outside, but it has many points to consider before and after sending emails. Marketers should be conscious of the KPIs and analyse their email campaigns numerically. In addition to preparing the most eye-catching and interesting emails, you should also personalise the emails and segment your audience.

Nobody would want their email to be deleted without being opened. To decrease this, sending the right email to the right person is very important. Contact us to try out our email personalisation tools, where you can see the improvements in your email campaigns in all of the previously mentioned KPIs. Start the new year with the best email marketing strategy!

Are you somehow still not convinced of how vital email marketing is to your marketing strategy? Or do you think it’s a thing of the past? Well, email marketing is definitely bigger than you think, especially when it’s personalised.

Without further ado, here are 35 email marketing statistics that you need to know:

Email Marketing is Integral to Any Marketing Strategy

When Done Right, Email Personalisation Will Make You Shine

Wrapping Up

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies that eCommerce companies can implement. When these emails are personalised towards your customers, this is even better.

Stay tuned for our next article about the Email Marketing KPIs you should absolutely know!

Like any generation, Gen Z has several traits that set them apart in terms of how they behave while making purchases and doing a search. Being the digital native generation influences their search behaviour significantly. But how can marketers use this to shape their brand for this generation?

Key Takeaways

Who’s Gen Z?

Gen Z is the generation that follows Millennials and comes before Generation Alpha. The early 2010s are used as the ending birth years by researchers and the general public, whereas the mid to late 1990s are the starting birth years. According to Pew Research, Gen Z is considered to be born in the years 1997 – 2012. The majority of Generation Z’ers are descendants of Generation X.

What Are the Unique Characteristics of Gen Z?

Digital Natives

Gen Z is the first generation to have grown up without dial-up internet or mobile phones that resembled bricks. They have spent their entire lives communicating with people via various social media networks since they were raised with the notion that they could talk to anyone in the world at any time.

Electronics, which were a luxury to their parents and older siblings, have always been a requirement for this generation to function in the modern world. They have also been labelled neo-digital natives due to their aptitude for technology.

Short Attention Spans

Compared to the previous generations, Gen Zs have an attention span of roughly 8 seconds, whilst the average attention span of millennials is slightly longer, at 12 seconds. This might be because, unlike Gen Z, they did not always have easy access to technology during their formative years.

Visual Learners

In recent years, the average attention span has shrunk by 25%, and 65% of pupils learn best visually. Due to social media, youngsters are becoming less interested in text and more interested in video-based media, which keeps their attention and aids in retention.

For Gen Zers, there isn’t much difference between their online and offline experiences. Therefore training, development, and learning procedures must change and rely heavily on diagrams, infographics, photographs, mind maps, and other visual aids.

Independent

The propensity of Gen Z for independent labour sets them apart from their Millennial peers. The competitive character of Gen Z leads to their desire to take charge of their own destiny and not depend on others for their success, in contrast to millennials, who are all about collaboration.

What Does This Mean for Marketers?

Be reachable on multiple platforms

Gen Z is active on many social media platforms; therefore, it is essential to be present on several social media sites for brands. This means that multi-channel marketing is more than just a one-size-fits-all endeavour. Marketers frequently duplicate a campaign and spread it out over several media.

When producing content for TikTok, keep the platform’s users in mind. The same applies to Facebook, TV, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and LinkedIn. These audiences are in no way similar to one another. In fact, Gen Z favours businesses that use each social media platform in a distinctive way.

Prepare content in multiple formats

As previously mentioned, Gen Z are visual learners. Therefore, visual content is more appealing to them than to other generations. This means they consume more visual and video content.

In addition to written and audio content, it is a great marketing strategy to include videos, GIFs, etc. Many brands open TikTok accounts to appeal to their Gen Z customers by sharing short video content.

Be a trustworthy source of information

Gen Z is more likely to support companies with a strong commitment to the issues that matter to them. Shopping and interacting with their favourite companies are ways for Gen Zers to express their values. 75% of Gen Z respondents to recent research responded that being politically or socially active is essential to their identity. These consumers are more socially conscious than any previous generation. Using social media to tackle difficult problems and contribute to the greater good, Gen Z looks to their favourite companies to do the same.

In addition to trusting the brand, this generation also gives high importance to the sources of information they get. They are more likely to research the source and don’t accept all information as true. Therefore, brands should be transparent with their statistics and advertising campaigns.

How Can Marketers Optimise for Gen Z’s Search Behaviour?

Create interactive content

Make sure marketing campaigns encourage Gen Z’s participation because they enjoy feeling like a part of a broader picture. These customers prefer direct interaction with their favourite businesses.

This generation wants engagement and the impression that the business created the content with them in mind. This indicates that it would be wise to involve them in projects of a greater size. Even though you might only publish one or two of them each year, if they appeal to this younger readership, people will remember them. This indicates that they’ll probably contact you again in the future.

Create content, not advertisements

Gen Z wants to absorb content and decide for themselves whether or not to purchase it. They seek fresh knowledge and a more effective method of operation. They are also a little more willing to spend than millennials.

One reason why Gen Z loves influencers is because of this. They want advertisements to be engaging, talk directly to them, and not be overtly product-placement-focused.

Optimise website navigation

This generation has the shortest attention span. So if you want to catch their attention, you have the least amount of time to do so. Creating an easy-to-navigate website would make them find whatever they want easier and faster, increasing their satisfaction with the website.

Gen Z needs to be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and decide on what they are purchasing swiftly. Creating a personalised search box that would make them find what they are searching for is the key to gaining more customers from this generation.

Create content that is accurate and trustworthy

When Gen Z interacts with businesses, they demand complete transparency and social responsibility. They are very aware, naming social media as their primary source of information to learn about new products. You need to match your brand with the causes and values that are significant to this generation if you want to connect with a group that is so committed to activism, sustainability, charitable giving, and truth-seeking. By highlighting your brand’s distinctive beliefs and offering critical education from a reliable source through customised storytelling and compelling content, influencers are a terrific method to demonstrate that alignment.

If your company wants to cut through the digital noise, set itself apart from the competition, and legitimately create connections and trust with Gen Z consumers where they are, influencers should be a significant component of your Gen Z marketing approach. Marketing to Generation Z is about gaining their trust through connections, community, and shared values.

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, Generation Z has different behaviours that brands should consider. They care less about the price and more about what the brand stands for, their unique marketing strategies and the easiness of the process.

For brands to catch the attention of Gen Z and keep them on their website, they must have personalised search tools. Personalisation is widely positively accepted by this generation. Therefore, offering them a personalised search experience would make them find what they are looking for more efficiently and faster, which is what they want.

Try out our Personalised Search tools to get the attention of your Gen Z customers and offer them the best search results ever!