Avoid Being a Basic Email Marketer: Email List Segmentation is Key

It’s human nature for all of us to want to be seen and understood. Successful personal relationships are built on the foundation of making your partner feel seen and understood and there’s no reason we shouldn’t all integrate that into our marketing efforts as well. So how does this apply to email list segmentation? Let’s dive in!

Email list segmentation consists of breaking your bulk email list down into smaller sections of similar groups of people, or groups of people with similar interests. By narrowing your list down, you can target people who have specific qualities with offers or products that resonate with them. 

The process of narrowing your list down not only makes your customers feel that your offers are perfectly aligned with their interests but also improves your overall return on investment (ROI) by increasing engagement. 

Proper email list segmentation delivers hyper-relevant information to different sections of people which frequently leads to higher open and click-through rates. Subscribers to your list are much more likely to engage with an email or offer that feels like it perfectly suits them than one that is generic and trying to catch the interest of anyone who might be on your list. It goes back to the marketing adage, “If you’re speaking to everyone, you’re speaking to no one.” 

Let’s take the travel niche for example. Inside of travel related content you have loads of different sub-niches: budget travel, family travel, luxury travel, international travel, minimalist travel, eco-friendly travel… the list goes on. 

Emails that discuss luxury travel destinations will be less engaging to those on your list that are interested in eco-friendly or minimalist travel. Enter email list segmentation. Through tracking certain measures and collecting data on your list over time you can hone in on your list’s individual interests and make sure that the people that are interested in luxury travel get different email content than those interested in minimalist travel. 

Ultimately this contributes to improved health of your list because you have increased engagement with your emails and less unsubscribes overall. People are receiving information they are actively seeking instead of generic information or information on a topic they aren’t interested in. 

You can also use email list segmentation to improve the efficiency of your communications, and your time spent, along with improving customer retention by providing content that’s always relevant to your subscribers. 

So how does this tie into building successful relationships? It’s all about making your list feel seen and understood. If you focus on segmenting your list and providing content that perfectly matches their interests, they’ll feel that their interests are relevant and that you understand what their focus is. 

In short: email list segmentation allows you to have a finger on the pulse of the different sections of your list and cater directly to them in your content.  

So we’ve got the why of segmentation, let’s move on to the how of list segmentation!

Get Personal: How to Segment Your Email List Like a Pro

The number of ways to segment an email list is widely varied among different niches and is ultimately unique to each business but there are four simple ways to start thinking about email list segmentation. 

Four Basic Ways to Segment Your Email List

Demographic Segmentation

As you might expect, demographic segmentation focuses on splitting up your email list based on demographic data that you’ve collected. This includes characteristics like: gender, age, income, education level, or job title. 

If we continue with our travel brand example, luxury travel content would be more appropriate for the segments of your list that have higher income levels whereas budget travel content might be more appropriate for the younger age segments on your list. 

By using these general demographics to begin your email list segmentation you can start to customize your content and increase your engagement. 

Geographic Segmentation

As you might expect, geographic segmentation consists of splitting up your list based on their physical location. This is especially significant for brands that have brick and mortar locations to allow you to target local people on your list for better engagement and foot traffic. 

Another way to look at this for online businesses, like our travel brand, would be to target specific geographical segments. This could be done by sending travel recommendations for a long weekend trip to certain regions of the country where your subscriber lives: long weekend trip ideas for locations in the Southeast US, Northeast US, Midwest US, etc. 

You’re providing value about specific locations that are more easily accessible to that segment of your list which they will find much more valuable than people that live across the country from those locations.

Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic email list segmentation is based around using people's interests, lifestyle choices, opinions, activities or values to provide distinction. This type of information can be gathered in different ways like questionnaire responses or leads that come in through targeted ad campaigns. 

Once you have data on your email list’s specific interests it becomes much easier to send them relevant information. Our travel brand might use this type of information to more easily identify segments of their list that are interested in family travel so they can provide content around that topic that will be seen as valuable. 

Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral email list segmentation focuses on segmenting based on how your customer or lead has interacted with your website, emails, and their previous purchases. With this particular type of data it becomes really important to have an integrated marketing system that can track these different behaviors, like Social Fox. If you’re not using an all-in-one marketing system yet, check out this post that outlines all the features you should expect from your system. 

For our online travel brand, for example, if someone has previously purchased an international charger adaptor you could reasonably assume that one of their interests is international travel. Based on this, you can customize your communications with them to include more international travel products or recommendations to increase their engagement with your brand and retain them as a customer.

In addition to that, this type of email list segmentation allows for retargeting of people who might have abandoned their shopping cart, so you can provide them with reminders to purchase or notify them about sales on items that they showed interest in previously, but didn’t purchase.

Email List Segmentation Best Practices

Especially when starting out, there are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to email list segmentation. Firstly, keep it simple. Starting with some basic segments and then building from there will be much more efficient than trying to get really granular with your list all at once. 

If you use an all-in-one marketing platform to manage your business then you have the ability to easily get the systems in place for segmenting your list. Once you have those in place, a lot of the actual segmenting of your email list can be done automatically on the back end for you as your list builds. 

While it’s tempting to really zero in on super specific and targeted segments of your list, you can go too far and oversegment. At Social Fox we’re huge fans of having lots of data from customers and leads as this allows you to better market to them, but you don’t necessarily need to have a separate email list for every single characteristic of your customers. Try grouping like characteristics or interests to consolidate your marketing efforts. 

It might go without saying, but make sure that you’re customizing your emails based on your segments. That’s really the whole purpose behind email list segmentation in the first place. Use the information that you know about your list and personalize your email content for them. Even making sure to use their names as part of the body of the email or in the subject line can greatly increase engagement. 

As with all marketing, make sure you’re always testing your content and checking in on your efforts. Are you segments not converting the way you’d like? Maybe they need to be restructured, are too large, or are too small. In addition to that, monitor the health of your list and update as needed. Are you removing people who have unsubscribed? Are you making sure that contact information and locations are still relevant? 

And lastly, leverage the power of automation to make your email list segmentation efforts worthwhile. Business automation is the wave of the future and can drastically reduce time spent on route or routine tasks completed in your business. 

At Social Fox we’re huge fans of automating business processes to free up time for our business owners. Let’s be honest, you already have enough on your plate, why not automate as much as you can to decrease your mental load?

Segmentation Saves the Day: The Benefits of Targeted Email Campaigns with Social Fox

Email list segmentation can seem daunting at first but with the right systems in place it can largely be automated and work for you in the background of your business 24/7. Social Fox uses a system of subscriber tagging, characteristics, link click tracking, and questionnaire style reporting to allow our users to easily segment their lists as they grow and scale.

This helps our users to put this process on autopilot and fully realize the benefits of what email list segmentation can do in their business. Proper email list segmentation paired with well thought out copywriting can do wonders for your customer engagement, increase your open and click-through rates, increase your ROI, and turn customers into fans.   

If you don’t have any list segmentation in place yet but want to get started, we’d love to help! It’s never too late to begin segmenting your list and customizing your communications. We routinely see improved open rates, engagement, and conversions when people get serious about segmenting their email list and providing consistent interaction with their customer base.

Not only that, but because Social Fox is an all-in-one marketing platform, all your systems integrate effortlessly with one another, in one place, under one login. Gone are the days of using Zapier to integrate your CRM with your calendar and your website. Go all-in-one and ditch the integration headache. 

Still unsure? Jump on our calendar for a demo call and see exactly what Social Fox can do [and automate] in your business!