The foundation of a stable marketing strategy is a target your market. Who is your audience? What kind of expectation do they have from your company? When you get to know these questions, you will probably better spend your marketing dollars. $$$
Example
Tom loves burgers, a lot <3. Putting on weight but super happy 🙂 One day he was ordering burgers online so he had to sign up to „FattyBenny” restaurant. Then because the restaurant had his e-mail they sent him a special offer: „… leave us some more details, then we will send you a special code in return” „Why not?”- he thought. After few seconds, he got a discount 15% off for the next order with a group of friends. Next day he asked John and Betty: „ How about eating out this evening? I’ve got 15% off for any burgers!”.That’s cool, they went together, spent more money, but they were so satisfied and got to know new ( better than others) restaurant. After 2 weeks, Tom got another email with discount 20% off for the double burger and 10% off for any drinks in exchange for the opinion of the quality of the service, OUGH!! That’s awesome! …”I’m going to have a burger again for few words!” Regardless of the circumstances, Tom will recommend „FattyBenny” because he gets some discounts and restaurant is in touch with him.
So…in this way you can see how email segmentation affects your actions – FattyBenny figured out that Tom likes burgers, results might be different if they would send an email with an offer for green salad ;). Proper email segmentation may truly boost your email marketing, give you a possibility to connect with your customers on another level and then show your appreciation and sell more at the same time!
How to start segmentation?
First, think about segmenting based on larger differentiating factors including:
Customer profile
This is where most will start, base on your customers’ profile, it means, you have to divide your B2C and B2B companies.
The easiest way is to get to know your customers’ name, after that, you have information about gender, so you can personalize an email much better. You can also make a research about their age, position, and gender, then convert them into paying customers. For B2B companies, including the size of company and industry, not really a job role. You have to get to know their needs, cooperation with other companies and market competition. Avoid being seen as spam by letting your customers know how often they will receive an email from you, what kind of offer they can expect. Find common ground with your new users or first-time buyers right by focusing your messages on subjects and actions that will extend their relationship with you. These users interact with your email frequently and give you the desired feedback.
You can give your customers the option to choose the type of email they would like to receive and you can even expect that they will sing a song” I don’t like it, I love it, love it, love it uh oh”… let’s know them even better!
Gender-Based Marketing Segmentation
This metric that can increase your conversion rates overnight without doing anything else. Knowing something as simple as whether a customer is male or female can be a game-changer for the type of content you use. It helps businesses identify trends and opportunities never seen before. When you focus on what men and women like in your product or service it will make it easier to convince them to make the purchase or visit your store one more time. Remember, you have to take care of the visual design of emails, relevant content, and promotions around customers’ gender. In the end, you will have happier customers, willing to spend money in your store, because they will feel appreciated.
As customers progress through the lifecycle, if all interactions with different communications such as email clicks and pages visited on site are captured, we’ll be able to build up a detailed response and purchase history. A more sophisticated option is to use RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis a marketing technique used to determine quantitatively which customers are the best ones by examining how recently a customer has purchased (recency), how often they purchase (frequency), and how much the customer spends (monetary). More and more email marketers use an informal RFM analysis to target their mailings to customers. Using RFM analysis, customers are assigned a ranking number of 1,2,3,4, or 5 (with 5 being highest) for each RFM parameter. The database is sorted to determine which customers were “the best customers” in the past, with a cell ranking of “555” being ideal.
Email activity and customer value
Segmentation by engagement is one of the most important segmentation technique. Why? Sending an email to people, who have not been opening your e-mails really hurts your deliverability. However, how satisfied you are when your open rates increase! 🙂 One of the reasons you should create a separate segment for active & inactive subscribers is that they should get different kinds of offers. Make sure that your email list consists of people who actually want to get your emails. This will always increase the ROI of your email marketing. On the other hand, you can send to your loyal customers a unique marketing message that encourages them to buy more products or services. Let’s give them a special discount or invitation to your conference.
The simplest, meaning that they are based on basic needs and interests. You can send relevant content to your customers with an exclusive offer or invite them to special competition, send them a thank you email. It allows you to deepen your relationship and “cross the borders”. A segmentation is becoming more and more of a must-have in email marketing. It’s a solution for marketers who would like to achieve higher click-through rates, better deliverability and generate more revenue from their email campaign. It can also drive an important long-term asset- sender reputation. Try to stick with the majority of your customers, you can make a webinar, summarize your services in PDF or make a video call, then you can continue to give them the type of content they like the best. Remember, everyone learns in different ways.
