Segmentation strategies in Email Marketing

One of the strategies that we can implement when we carry out an Email Marketing campaign is segmentation. Currently, most mass mailing software offers several options for segmenting your mailings.

What is Segmentation in Email Marketing?

Segmentation in Email Marketing is a strategy that allows you to create groups of email contacts, based on various parameters. This facilitates the personalization of the different campaigns, tailoring the content to the interests of these groups. This will make the communications you send more relevant to subscribers, giving them a better opportunity to open and click on those email messages.

Segmentation criteria in Email Marketing

We have different segmentation criteria for Email Marketing, although the most common are usually:

• Position. The physical site where users are located. This is one of the best segmentation that can be done, as it allows you to communicate with users from a certain location. To be able to do this, you need to have some specific information about the user such as country, city, postal code or physical address, so it is important if you intend to carry out this type of segmentation, to take this into account in the data collection forms. This segmentation is also vital for local businesses, as it allows users to reach specific areas where the business is located.
• Demographics. This is another of the more common segmentations used. In many occasions, it is very sensitive data that the user will not want to complete, especially in a first interaction with the company, so it is necessary to encourage him to know more about him, through different actions which can be raffles, promotions, discounts for birthdays, etc. Here you can make further subdivisions according to criteria of:
  • Age.
  • Sex.
  • Income level
• User behavior in emailing campaigns. The actions that users perform when we send emails, such as openings and clicks, will be able to establish categories within them. This is already done by several email software, which rate users with stars, depending on the number of times they open and click on communications. With this segmentation, a series of steps can also be established through automation tools, which can direct users (through a previously defined interaction flow) to perform any action we want to complete.
• Website activity. You can send an email campaign to users who have visited a specific product page or added an item to their cart and have not completed the purchase.
• Interaction with the company. Another of the segmentations that can be carried out depends on the interaction of these users with the company. Here it is important to try to recover users who have not opened our shipments for a long time or to entrust them to inactive users.
• Purchase Actions. We can classify users who are buyers of our products into different segments to which we can send related product offers. Here Amazon or platforms like Netflix have been doing this practice for years with guaranteed success through their interest categorization algorithms.

How to segment an email database

You can follow the following steps:

• Decide which type of segmentation to apply. Taking into account the different criteria that we will apply in our activity to classify the different subscribers.
• Create segmentation lists. Based on the criteria seen, users must be classified into different segmentations. In this case one option is to add each user to specific interest lists to subsequently send communications related to that interest.
• Content adapted to each segment. You have to send content that could be of interest to each segment, measuring the results to improve little by little with this process.

As you can see, with this type of technique you can refine Email Marketing campaigns much more.