Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of direct engagement, it’s more than twice as effective as social media marketing. With over 246 billion emails being sent every day, 79% of Americans want marketing emails to be more tailored to their interests. By implementing a segmentation strategy, the ROI of email marketing can grow up to 77%.
What is email segmentation?
Email segmentation is the process of using different criteria to divide email subscribers into smaller segments.
Segments are a form of “triggered emails” that use customer behavior to modify the content they’re being sent. The purpose of this tactic is to create an element of personalization to increase the likelihood of engagement.
How to start segmenting emails?
As you begin to implement your new strategy, start simple. In your early phases of creating email segments, start with only 2-3 groupings that categorize your contacts broadly. One easy way to divide your contacts is by “prospects who have engaged with your content”, versus those who have not. Using this distinction, you can generate more product specific sales copy for anyone who has already engaged with you.
To optimize groupings and increase the number of segments you’re using, it’s important to factor in key demographics and build contact profiles.
What demographic data do you need to build contact profiles?
The first step in collecting the necessary demographic data is to establish your business’s buyer persona – the set of attributes that define and represent your ideal customer. A well thought out buyer persona will give insight into the demographics that will influence your marketing material.
During this process consider gender, age, location, industry, seniority, and annual revenue.
Where can you get contact data?
The most common place emails and contact data are acquired is on corporate websites. You can do this by positioning an email capture form on each page of your website. The capture form should ask visitors to fill out the information about themselves you need to determine how they fit into your buyer persona. To be effective, your capture form should be short and not overly invasive.
It’s helpful to offer some potential benefit such as a free trial or demo in exchange for signing up. Contact capture forms can be used as a mandatory step before visitors can access a free resource guide or book. When contacts request to download a free resource, your marketing team also can get more insight into their interests based on the resources they choose.
Why use email segmentation?
Email segmentation is a highly effective marketing strategy that can be automated for greater ease and efficiency. Businesses that use this strategy can deliver content that relates better to their subscribers which, according to a MailChimp study, reduces the number of people unsubscribing from their emails by up to 9.37%. The same study indicated that email segmentation leads to a 14.31% increase in email opens, and more than double the number of email clicks.
