Email Marketing: How to Segment Your Contact List

Every business has several different types of customers, or buyer personas, with certain demographic, psychological and behavioral characteristics. By segmenting your contact list, you can send content that speaks to each reader, which would in turns boost their level of engagement. It allows you to have more relevant content sent at the right time to the right email recipients. The more relevant your messages are to your contacts’ personal interests, the more likely they’ll be to open your emails regularly.

Doesn’t that sound effective to blast out email newsletters by allowing to deliver your content only to the right prospectus? Yes, this email marketing strategy is ever-effective yet often ignored.

You can segment your email marketing list by simple things like gender, age, education level and some other characteristics like purchasing behavior, location, subscriber level reporting, the device they are using to read the email and so much more!

Let us discuss, few ways on how to segment your contact list for email marketing:

Age and gender

By simply knowing the age and gender of people who opt-in for your email would help you to personalize your email specifically for them. Yes, it helps you speak to the individual and not to the crowd. To do this, you can direct them to the signup form to collect these basic information.

Location

Knowing where your contacts live can be seriously powerful information. Finding out your subscriber’s location is as easy as adding a zip code to your purchase or opt in forms. Usually it is said that 8-9 am is the best time to send out emails. However if most of your customers lives in different time zones, then they may be receiving your email s at the wrong time. Hence, segmenting based on location can be extremely beneficial to ensure your email arrives at the optimal time to guarantee higher open rates and click-through rates.

Past purchases and buying frequency

If a segment of your list has purchased from you before, use that information to send them emails catered to that which interests them. Also reward frequent shoppers with an invitation to your loyalty program to make your brand even stickier!

Industry types

Maybe you have different products that can be great for different industries. If you’re selling to other businesses, you’ll want to customize your content and promotions per industry. Have contacts choose from a list of your principal industries so it gives you an idea of what you could be sending their way.

Page view

You would have noticed some of your contacts visiting specific pages of your website. You can send them tailored content based on a page they’ve spent time viewing or visited repeatedly.

Shopping cart abandonment

Suppose you have an online store and a customer has abandoned their shopping cart. In such case, you can shoot them a reminder email about the left items in their cart and direct them back to your website.

 

IT’S YOUR TURN

What do you think of this article? Share your experience and insights in the comment box below.

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