Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing Segmentation

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!

Key Takeaways

• Behavioural Segmentation is when buyers are divided into groups based on their knowledge, attitude, uses, or responses to a product.
• By segmenting your email audience, you will be able to have higher conversion rates.
• The best email marketing strategy occurs when email lists are segmented and the results are analysed and tracked via A/B testing.

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.