How regularly do you get emails that have no relevance to you? For example, retailers send emails promoting female clothing to males. Whilst there may be a one in a hundred chance that a male could make a purchase for a friend, family member or significant other, let’s be honest, it’s more damaging than anything.
People want to feel special. Like they matter. You don’t achieve that by sending them an email that doesn’t take into consideration what we already know about them.
Email segmentation is defined by Campaign Monitor as the division of email subscribers into smaller segments based on set criteria.
The risk of not segmenting data
If you choose not to segment or don’t realise the importance of doing so (before reading this blog post, obviously…) then you run the risk of losing potential customers.
If people receive an email from you that doesn’t feel relevant, the likelihood is that they’ll just delete it. If they continue to receive further irrelevant emails, they’re gradually moving closer to unsubscribing. And that’s a danger zone for your business. People who unsubscribe very rarely resubscribe. The old adage says it’s much cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one. It’s important that marketers remember that.
Opportunities for email segmentation
We collect data from our buyers and website visitors all of the time. But do we use it effectively? Some do. Most do not.
Here are some ways you could segment email data for success:
Say for instance that you’re a retailer. Naturally, you’ll have a number of ways you collect data: email mailing lists to drive sales, as well as sales data. Assuming you’re tracking web visits and behaviours effectively (if you’re not, why are you not?), then you can see the pages people visit and how often they visit. If somebody keeps coming back to a specific product page or series of pages – i.e., men’s jumpers, we understand there’s interest in means jumpers. So, let’s send them email content about men’s jumpers – this could be sales, offers or discounts, or it could be information about the quality of jumpers, new-in products, and so on.
Or maybe you’re a membership organisation that has a blog and insights section. You have very clear categories, for example, one section focuses on digital marketing and another on public relations (PR). They’re very different skill sets and areas. You could use your website tracking to understand what people are interested in by the blogs they’re reading. i.e., if they only ever visit the public relations section, let’s make sure we don’t send them emails that contain tonnes of digital marketing content.
If you’re in a particularly niche industry, personalisation and segmentation is so incredibly important. People are looking for a specific area of expertise, and you need to nail it on the head straight away. Think about the dangerous goods industry, for example. Within that, there are 9 core hazard classes when it comes to substances and materials. Class 1 covers explosives. Class 6 covers infectious & toxic substances. If you start to send content about explosives to somebody who is only involved with infectious substances, you’re going to start to put people off – you will seem irrelevant to their needs.
Suddenly you can start to see why email segmentation is so important, right?
The more data you can collect, the more opportunities you’ll spot to segment data and be more personalised. Personalisation drives opportunity and opportunity drives business growth. It’s a no-brainer.