As a marketer, you’ll be very aware of “relevance” and “email segmentation” – it’s likely they’re brought up every single day. That’s because when you blend the two together effectively, you’ll soon be sending the right message to the right person, at the right time.
Email segmentation can be carried out in many forms because there are different ways to group your contacts depending on their engagement levels. For example, you could vary your delivery speeds to drill down into specific audiences and ensure they’re receiving hyper-personalised, relevant digital comms they want to read.
To give you a feel for just how far you can go with your data to effectively engage with your recipients, Adam Oldfield, CEO of Force24, gives a couple of different types of email segmentation for you to consider…
Email engagement segmentation
This is perhaps the most important way to group your contacts because it’s based on your interactions and who you should be speaking to, when, and with what message.
To do this, take all your contacts and narrow them down in relation to the time period in which they last engaged with your marketing message. Then you can decide how frequently to send your hyper-personalised emails. If you’re communicating with a certain group regularly, follow this example…
Vary the speeds with your email sends so you can isolate a much smaller segment of data. Once you understand the definition of your email segmentation and how engaged they are, you can start to define what you expect from each audience. Here’s a couple of things to factor in too:
- Prop your passive data segment up with the reputation you gain from your engaged base.
Here’s what we’d recommend in this instance…
To discover how many emails you should be sending, take your active base and times it by three to give you the approximate volume per month. There’s more on this type of email segmentation below…
If you follow these “rules”, there are a few important points about the above table to truly nail your email segmentation:
- Every six months you’ll need to be at peace with the fact that 20 per cent of your base is likely to become unengaged.
- When this happens, focus on continual data capture to keep your contacts fresh.
- And make sure you review your data segments weekly.
If you haven’t already, think about how marketing automation can help you to set up these email segmentation rules. That way your contacts are automatically moved to and from various segments based on their real-time interactions – all while you prioritise deepening customer relationships and being creative. Achieve this and watch your open and conversion rates go through the roof!
Vertical segmentation
This type of email segmentation is all about understanding your audience and which part of your proposition will most likely attract them.
Your job as a savvy marketer is to break down your data into segments you can target effectively with relevant, hyper-personalised messages. Forget about one-size-fits-all or batch and blast in this instance – marketing has moved on and you don’t want to be left behind.
With tighter email segmentation you can be more specific with your digital comms and deliver a better engagement rate and bottom line impact as a result. With Force24, you can segment users based on browsing engagement and ultra-personalise content that’s centred around an individual’s of-the-moment interests.
Now’s the time to sophisticate your messages and your contact base using marketing automation technology. We’ll show you how to make your data segments go further via growth, lead scoring, seasonal activity, and more.