How to Segment Your Email list – Some of the Best Practices

Email marketing experts suggest that we should segment our email list. But how to segment your email list ? what criteria should we segment our email list?

I’ve done a little digging and found out that the best practice to segment email list is based on contacts/subscribers interaction with your emails.

Here’s what I mean by that.

Interaction means read your email, clicked on your links, replied to your email or forwarded your email. Most of email marketing software allows you to track email read (a contact has opened your email) and clicked to your CTA.

Now we understand interactions, what we need next is to assigned point to a contact if she or he made any interactions such as read, clicked ect.

For example, Lisa has just subscribed to your email to download a free gift. You then send her email with the download link. If she reads your email, she then will be given 3 points. When the next day you email her to do a survey, Lisa will receive 3 more points because she has opened your email. Now she has total 6 points. Her points build up. When she reaches 100 points (from all sort interactions) you will put her on segment “Engaging contacts”

If Lisa hasn’t purchased any of your products/services, you can email her saying “Hai Lisa, we have been in touch lately. So to respect our relationship. I’d like to give you this gift and 50% discount to my product/service. Click this link”

Mautic -the open source email marketing software- allows you to put points based on your contacts interactions. If your email marketing software doesn’t have that feature, maybe it’s time to migrate to Mautic -or you can read below other best practice on how to segment your email list.

One thing about Mautic before you migrate. Mautic is an email marketing management software where you can setup your campaign, create automation and other basic email marketing features.

However, Mautic does not send your email to your contacts. You need an Email Sending Service. One of the most popular is Amazon SES that’ll send your emails.

You could also use Mesta SMTP Email Sending Service. It works like Amazon SES but a lot easier to setup.

Click this link below to sign up for Mesta SMTP.

So, how to segment your email list if your current software doesn’t allow you to segment based on points -in other word- interactions.

Here are some of the best practices to segment you email list.

Start with the basic: Demography

How to segment your email list based on demography. It’s relatively easy.

You can start with gender, age or location because not all of your customers want the same thing or have the same objections.

Some of your female customers or potential buyers might have different objections. So you also need to figure that out in your emails.

Even if you don’t want to segment your contact outside of age, gender and location, you can stop right there and your email segmentation would be as much effective -instead of no segmentation at all.

Furthermore, segmentation at this levels allow you to have a smaller pieces of personal such as pronoun to use for a product recommendation based on specific area that you can offer.

Your segmentation based on location is greatly dictated by your sort of service. The point that I’m making here is that you have to make sure that you’re focusing on geographic location that your business is on.

So that’s your basic information on how to segment your email list. Here are some other great ways how to segment your email list.

By Segmenting Companies

You can differentiate your contact based on where they work. this means that you need to find out what company they are working now.

I personally have seen this kind of segmentation used by big companies where they require you to fill in company name on their form.

Other ways how to segment your email list based on companies is the size of the company. is it midsize, small business or Enterprise level.

You can then send three different emails out, each one is pointing out part of your services that especially appealing for that size business.

Segmenting Base on Sales funnel

You can differentiate your funnel with cold, warm or hot contacts. You could also differentiate your funnels with your target , and then those who have engaged with your emails and those who have convert i.e. purchase one of your service or products.

So someone at the top of you sales funnels who just want to get free information doesn’t care about discount that you’re offering. Because you should push discount for those of your contact of the bottom of your sales funnel i.e. hot or convert.

Likewise, someone who has engaged with your content or website will probably not interested in an introductory email that provides a very basic information about your service or product. Because they happened it spent months researching about their problem.

By segmenting your email list according to your customers position in sales funnels, you can sure make your contacts receive email that they need.

According to your contacts behavioral changes

This is an amazing way to make sure that your customers keep coming or with your email as high as possible. But how to segment your email list based on behavioral changes.

Here’s the example.

If you have a customer who previously loyal who have bought from you every X months for the past year. But now she hasn’t purchased anything any more. You’re going to want to send her a kind of emails. Maybe you want to ask her if she needs Assistance, or has she changed her primary email address, or if she is interested to learn about new products or services.

The point is you cannot send emails to your contact who just sign up for your email. Customers’ Behavioral changes happens all the time and you should need to make sure that you think of a way to make your customer retention as high as possible.

based on your customers’ past purchases

If your email marketing software can determine a clear buying pattern for your customer, this is a fantastic way to keep them up-to-date on your products or services that they actually care about.

For example if you own a pet store some of your customer want to constantly buy dogfood and some other will buy cat food and some will buy bird seed.

Here’s the thing, the ones buying dog food probably don’t care about a bird seed promotion and neither do the cat food customers.

This type of segmentation based on past purchases is the core of Amazon business model.

They know what you were looking for what you wanted to buy and what you will need in the future. This because they have this data about you so they can show products that you actually need based on your past purchases.

you can start segmenting your email list today

These are the best practices how to segment your email list. segmentation criteria defer depending on what industry you’re in, what types of customers you serve, and so on. But there are always some ways how to segment your email list.

If you’re looking to start using email list segmentation in a advanced way, Masta can help you.

Click this link to learn more.

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Sandy at Zuhrwi.com says “thanks for your emails. Can’t wait for more”

Indra – Art Design Freelancer says “you have made me hooked to your emails. Tell me how you did it!”

Salma – Internet Marketer says “whatever they write, they’ve proved it on their emails”

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