A good email marketing campaign relies heavily on email segmentation. That’s why email continues to be the most effective channel for nurturing and converting leads into customers.

Email segmentation, as the name implies, breaks your email list subscribers into groups based on shared characteristics, demographics, or habits. Before commencing any email marketing campaign, it’s critical to segment your emails. It ensures that your leads receive highly focused and tailored content.

As a result, the likelihood of them becoming clients improves. That’s why businesses that use email marketing see a 38x return on their investment.

Despite this, 89% of companies, including B2B and B2C, do not use email segmentation. This is only one of the numerous reasons why email marketing strategies fail for so many organizations.

Don’t worry if you’re one of them!

In this blog post, we’ll go through various email segmentation tactics that you may use to segment your email list right away. But first, let’s define the term “email marketing segmentation.”

What Is Segmented Email Marketing?

Segmented email marketing is the practice of dividing your email subscribers list into smaller sections. The subscribers are segregated into groups based on some specific sets of conditions. This practice of segmented email marketing is mainly performed for increasing the engagement levels of your campaigns.

Your target audience is bound to consist of a wide variety of people who have different interests, behaviors, and digital profiles. So delivering the same old email copy to each reader simply does not make any sense.

Enter segmentation strategy! It works mainly because it involves delivering personalized content that resonates with the specific segment of the target audience. The fact that segmented emails have a 100.95% higher click rate and 14.31% higher open rates than non-segmented emails is a proof that the effort bears sweet fruits. So let’s dive right into a few tips that will help your email marketing campaigns achieve such magnificent results for your business.

1. Understand The Basics

The word “email list segmentation” is derived from the more generic term “market segmentation,” which refers to the process of breaking a target audience into logical subgroups based on stated criteria. 

The concept is the same in email marketing, but you start with your email contact list rather than your entire audience. Like any other marketing campaign, you have to have a thorough idea of the basics before launching a full-fledged segmentation strategy.

To begin, you should know that there are four broad segmentation categories:

• Demographic: This type of segmentation is performed based on the core identity of email subscribers. For example, you can segment based on gender or age.
• Psychographic: Next sort of segmentation is done by considering specific types of characteristics or personality traits. Here you will segregate on the basis of the reader’s lifestyle or values.
• Behavioral: This one’s the most prominent type of segmentation. You need to implement this for maximum engagement. Here you will group the subscribers based on their buying patterns like ticket size, purchasing frequency, and so on.
• Geographic: Location-based segmentation is pretty straightforward. Here you can cater to the subscribers via the local events.

Since most segmentation strategies revolve around gathering meaningful data, the only logical next step would be to gain clarity on your data points.

2. Establish Data Points

First and foremost, you cannot create segments without data. The information that is most important to your business will be determined by the type of product you sell. 

For example, if you’re in the clothes and apparel sector, gender and age will be the most important aspects to consider when segmenting your email list. However, if you’re selling a SaaS product or marketing software, you might want to know your subscriber’s industry and occupation.

Decide what client information will help you sell more productively, how you’ll organize that data, and how you’ll obtain the data. Then find a way—either by creating your own set of icons or downloading an existing icon set from the Internet—to convey those segments visually. Here, the main goal is to bring your consumers to the activation stage of sales funnel, whether that means buying something or using a certain function.

Consider this: Successfully retaining even 5% more clients could result in a 25% boost in profit. So inactivity is something you should be aware of. Focus on improving your data-gathering methods to meet your conversion goals to make the most of your email marketing.

Ponder the following three questions:

1. What information do we already have? – These are the segments with the lowest entry barriers.
2. What kind of information can we start gathering? – These are data points that you can track but haven’t arranged into useful information yet.
3. What information do we require? – This is information that you must directly seek from your users or devise a method to gather.

3. Etch Out User Personas

Customers who fit perfectly into a company’s sales funnel are well-known to all businesses. If you provide eCommerce order fulfillment services, for example, an online store fits neatly into your funnel. 

However, if a college student signs up and becomes a subscriber, your prospects of making a sale are reduced on several levels.

As a result, determining your buyer’s persona appropriately is a crucial step in segmenting your email lists. To put it another way, you’re developing the personality of your ideal consumer.

Identifying your customer’s persona serves as a starting point for developing critical messaging. To define your buyer’s persona, use the following checklist:

• Examine your customer’s demographics
• Look at your clients’ preferences, their behavior, the things they’re interested in, and the date they signed up
• Determine the primary issues that your clients are experiencing
• What are your options for resolving these issues?

4. Leverage Relevant Email Copy

It’s time to write your email after you’ve created your first set of email lists. You must generate content that is well-tailored and customized for your segmented email groups. 

You don’t have to write a completely new email copy for each segmented list. Instead, change the material in your email copy to fit the target groups. After all, personalization in email campaigns can increase your revenue by 760%.

To perfect their email lists, most businesses conduct numerous rounds of tests. 

Another aspect of segmenting your email lists is to aim for hyper-segmentation. It’s quite straightforward. You send a few email campaigns to your first email lists to see how they respond. You could identify gaps in your segmentation process by doing this exercise.

But don’t underestimate the difficulty of this task. You must write emails that are relevant to your target audiences. Sending too many emails may end up in your recipient’s spam folder.

To save time and money, consider using a free AI writing solution that can help you create effective emails tailored specifically for each segmented list.

Wrapping Up

Now that you’ve learned the ropes, it’s time to move away from generic emails and toward more personalized interactions with your subscribers. Begin by selecting one critical variable that distinguishes different segments of your audience.

You may then tailor your campaigns to meet their various requirements. Even modest tweaks to your emails can improve their effectiveness, resulting in increased engagement and conversions.