An Introduction to Email Segmentation

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods to acquire new customers. Did you know that 72% of people prefer to receive promotional content through email rather than social media channels (17%)? For anyone who is looking to develop a highly successful email campaign, listening to what potential customers are saying will help you to tailor your marketing strategy to their demand.

It is pointless spending hours every week developing social media content if your target audience doesn’t want to receive promotional content in that format. The first rule of marketing is understanding what your target audience wants and needs.

With the first part out of the way, let's look at the stats for email marketing success. Recent research shows that email is 40 times more effective in acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. Therefore, if you are wondering where you need to be spending your marketing budget, this is as clear an indication as you can get.

Right so we’ve established that email marketing is the top way to get new customers, what next? At this stage, it is worthwhile pointing out that your email campaigns will be more effective if you make them personalized to the recipient rather than a ‘one size fits all’ approach. Personalized emails have a much higher chance of being opened and also result in a significantly higher number of leads.

If you are not very familiar with the idea of sending personalized, segmented and targeted emails then now is the time to find out more. Using these techniques, you can drive large volumes of visitors to your website and convince them to buy your products or services.

There are a number of ways that you can use data to tailor emails to your target audience. The most common ways are to use demographics such as gender, age, location, jobs and other personal information that you may have stored about the person. If you have a list of say 500 people, you should be looking to break that down into small groups. You can work out how to segment them based on demographics or any other information like purchase history that is most appropriate to your services/product.

For example, if you were a travel agency and your records show that a certain section of customers have purchased holidays at the same time each year, this is information that you can use to target them at the right time when they are looking to book their next holiday.

Or if you are a jewellery shop owner and you know that certain customers frequently spend more than a few hundred pounds on ladies jewellery, you would send them deals that fit the price range and style of previous purchases. If you send them deals for men’s jewellery that is priced at less than £50 you’re less likely to get them to make the purchase. Therefore, make sure to use all of this useful information to get the highest rates of success in email marketing.

Janeth Kent

Licenciada en Bellas Artes y programadora por pasión. Cuando tengo un rato retoco fotos, edito vídeos y diseño cosas. El resto del tiempo escribo en MA-NO WEB DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT.