It’s simple - segmentation increases email marketing responsiveness. In a world where we’re inundated with thousands of marketing messages every day, relevancy is the key to catching your subscribers attention. If we can agree on that, then we can also agree that you need to start segmenting your email marketing.
So you ask, “where to start?” That’s going to depend on your industry and how much data you have about your subscribers. A good place to begin for segmentation rookies is to examine the gender make up of your audience. How many of your subscribers are male and how many are female? Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, right? So why are you sending them the exact same content? Setting up a gender-based segmentation isn’t as hard as you might think. In fact, it’s really very simple. Let’s look at how this process might unfold.
We have an imaginary client - Jane’s Shoe Store. Jane is a small business owner, but she really loves email marketing and wants to start using segmentation to increase response rates and sales. She has an opt-in list, but to date, she hasn’t been collecting gender data. We’re going to help Jane set up her sign-up form and create a campaign using segmentation.
Step 1 - Get the data. The easiest way to do this is add a field on your sign-up form that requests some demographic information. It’s up to you whether you want to make these fields optional or not. If you do make it optional, consider a third version of your campaign that is gender neutral. Your email marketing service providers should provide a dynamically generated sign up form for you. All you need to do is place a link to it on your website and decide what type of data you want to collect when a subscriber opts-in.
Step 2 - Plan your campaigns. Step into the shoes of your male subscribers. What’s selling the best in the store for the men? Do the same for your female demographic. Now, plan two separate email campaigns - one for the males and another for the females. For Jane’s campaign, she wants to highlight a new Gucci loafer to her male subscribers. For the females, she’s going to highlight the new Vera Wang pumps. Design your campaigns accordingly and adjust the subject lines to fit the demographic. See how we’ve changed our design and subject lines for the two different segments:
Female Campaign Subject Line: The New Vera Wang Is Here
Our female subject line is highlighting something relevant to them. This basic segmentation stands a much higher chance of getting a lady to open our email. In addition, the campaign has been personalized with gender relevant image.
Male Campaign Subject Line: The Gucci Loafer Is Here
As we did with our female grouping, we’re highlighting a product that is of interest to our male subscribers. The campaign content is very similar, but we’ve substituted our subject line and an image that’s relevant to men.
Step 3 - Segment Your Data. Once Jane has her campaigns designed and ready to roll, she’s going to segment her list. She’s ensured that subscribers are opting in as a male or female. As long as her email marketing provider allows for segmentation, she can pull a list of male recipients and another of her female recipients. If her sign-up form is setup properly, anytime a new subscriber joins her list, he or she will be added to the appropriate list segment.
Once Jane’s completed these three easy steps, she’s ready to send her first segmented campaigns. Once she’s gotten the hang of it, she can segment by additional data. She’ll want to add those fields to her sign-up form, and she’s going to be cautious not to add TOO many fields. If her opt-in form becomes too tedious, it’s likely many of her potential subscribers will leave before completing the form.
- Some other data Jane might want to segment by:
- Age
- Geographic Location
- Job Titles
- Opens and Clicks (If they clicked on a link previously, what was the link about? Send a campaign with more details.)
- Past Purchases
These commonly used segments can pave the way for more opens, clicks - and most importantly - revenue! Whether you’re a retailer, nonprofit, service provider or lolly pop sales man, you can use segmentation to increase your email marketing effectiveness.
About the author
Winston Bowden is Vice President of Marketing at Durham-based Contactology ().
Reach him via .