Segmentation is a super powerful tool in your email marketing toolkit! By categorizing groups of customers by characteristics, demographics and behaviours, we can ensure we’re getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time: The key to high click rates and an engaged audience. In this week’s blog, I’ve outlined some simple segmentation options you might want to explore when categorizing your own list!
One of the biggest opportunities for many online businesses is converting occasional purchasers into loyal customers. These may be people who have made one or two significant purchases but don’t buy or visit the business regularly, and whilst they may have nothing else in common but this trait, this knowledge alone can help us build our email marketing strategy to create highly effective and personalized content.
If you’ve been in my world a while, you’ll have heard me espousing the virtues of personalization and targeted email content, and one of the best ways to achieve this is through email segmentation by characteristics just like this: Shopping behaviours.
By categorizing groups of customers like those mentioned above – however small a percentage of your overall email list they are – we can create multiple segments of shoppers, each with different habits, preferences and untapped potential to explore in a targeted way: Small but Mighty Segments!
For example, for the group above, who’ve made one or two large purchases, you might design a campaign to tempt them back into making a second purchase soon after with a personalized recommendation and thank you. By making the customer feel valued, and reinforcing this new buying behaviour, you could be encouraging them to create a habit of purchasing more regularly from your online business.
For another group segmented by their low spend per visit, you might create a campaign around their favourite products with some tempting upsells, aimed at increasing order value rather than frequency.
Once you have the data to understand your customer behaviours better, email segmentation can be an extremely powerful way to utilize that data to manipulate shopper habits and behaviours and drive higher engagement with your emails themselves, as the content will feel much more tailored to them.
If you’re new to email segmentation, here are a few suggestions of how you might start to think about segmenting your own email list of customers:
- Segment by marketing preferences: If some customers have opted to hear from you with regular updates, and some have indicated they only want to hear about special offers, you could create segments for each, to make it easier to decide who will receive each campaign or newsletter.
- Segment by engagement: If you have a limited offer you’d like to test out, it might be helpful to know who your most engaged, ready-to-read audience members are. Why not create segments to show you which groups of customers are most actively engaged with your brand and emails, so you know who to target when you need a quick win?
- Segment by average spend: As mentioned above, segmenting by average spend per visit can be useful, as it can help you intentionally design upsell campaigns to increase spend per visit, increasing the overall lifetime value of those customers inclined to spend less. It can also help you decide who to target with more exclusive, high-ticket items.
- Segment by Demographics: If you have a broad range of products, chances are you also have a broad range of clientele. You may wish to segment by age, gender or other key demographics, to ensure you promote only the relevant products and services to the right customers, so they remain interested in what you’re selling.
- Segment by frequency of purchase: Also mentioned above, knowing how frequently a customer purchases from you can inform your email strategy, as you may wish to nurture them with low-ticket items more regularly, to strengthen the trust and build loyalty. A little extra TLC for the high ticket, but low-frequency customers could pay off big time in the future!
In fact, we helped our client, an international retailer, increase their email ]sales by 5.5 times using email segmentation in exactly this way. Click here to check out how!