How to segment your email list

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Heard that you need to segment your email list but have no idea what this means or how to do it? Come on in to learn the basics of how you can easily segment your subscribers to get better results from your emails.

How to segment your email list

Segmenting can be scary, especially when you’re not tech savvy. But all you need to know is that it’s a way to add your subscribers to logical “buckets” of how you want to categorise your audience.

Why?
It means you can target customers more effectively and get the right message to the right person, because your audience will have people at different stages of their journey and each will have different needs. Even if you have the one client avatar to guide your business, there will be nuances that will mean better engagement and more sales with the right message.

What is segmenting?

So before we get into how to do this, that let’s look at what segmenting really is.

It’s the perfect way to write emails that are more relevant to your list. No one likes to be bombarded with emails that have nothing to do with them - this is especially true if your business sells a variety of products. If you only have one product you can segment based on behaviour, which I’ll get into in a minute.

There are two types of emails you can send - automated and broadcast.  

Broadcasts are emails that you send based on time, like your newsletter or a specific promotion or offer tied to a specific date (they’re still broadcasts if you set them up ahead of time and send them automatically).

The other email type is automated emails that are triggered automatically by a behaviour like a new purchase, an opt-in, or a click on a link.

Both these emails can be used for segmenting, either to segment your audience or as a response to the segmentation you’ve already established.

So how do we segment our email lists?

Here are a couple of ways to segment your subscribers:

BEHAVIOUR

So if you’re sending regular emails (which I hope you are since email is still one of the best marketing strategies available to any business) you can tag your subscriber depending on what action they take, like clicking a specific link. 

A link in an email can have a tag associated to it so that you know that they’ve clicked that link when you look at their record, or you want to send further emails only to the people who clicked that link.

INTEREST

Depending on how you’re running your business you may be sending a variety of content emails that are to educate and help your audience in their journey but there may be different paths they take depending on their interest.  For example, if you sell natural beauty products, you may have customers who are only interested in hair care, whereas some may only be interested in hand wash. 

The key is to note their interests by tagging them based on what information they read or click through to. You’ll find most customers will have a cross-section of interests and the subject matters they’re curious about will overlap like a Venn diagram, but it’s still good practice to tag them so you can later retargeted them with relevant information.

This doesn’t mean you have to only send certain emails to segments of your list, as there may be times where your customers are ready for new information on a certain subject, but it’s useful to know their interests to make sure you’re not overwhelming your audience if you’re sending lots of emails.

How to segment

TAGS BASED ON WHAT YOUR SUBSCRIBERS CLICKS ON IN EMAILS

You can add tags to your subscriber depending on whether they’ve clicked a link in an email. So if you’re sending out an article about “How to go Vegan” then you know those who click have an interest in Vegan topics.

This is where you might want to consider the “buckets” that your audience fall into so that you have a logical tagging system around your content.  If you regularly blog, then your blog categories can be useful tags to have in your email system. IF you have product categories, again these also might be good tags to use.

ASK THEM TO SELF SEGMENT

You can always ask your subscribers to self segment.  You can do this directly in an email by offering a few choices that might interest them ex. “What are you most interested to learn about? 1. Hair care, 2. Bath Bombs, 3. Household cleaning”. Once they click the link most relevant to them, you can send them to a page that has more information on that subject.

ASK THEM IN A SURVEY

It’s always useful to send out a survey to collect data on your audience as you grow and evolve.  Make it as short as you can so you reduce the friction so they say yes easily, but comprehensive enough to make it useful. Use the data to segment your audience and get a better understanding of who is on your list and their purchasing habits.

ASK THEM ON YOUR WEBSITE (EG. THREE WINDOWS)

Even though we’re talking about emails here, you can still segment your audience through your website by offering a variety of options depending on your categories. A popular way of doing this is to have three options on your website for people to choose.  This may correspond with product categories, stages of their journey, or different viewpoints. You can have a variety of opt-ins that are relevant to each subject matter or even product suites so that you can then set up automated email responses that are directly related to what they opted in for.

BY WHAT THEY’VE ALREADY RECEIVED

To make sure you’re nurturing your people well, and not sending them a variety of emails around various topics, you can put limits on your email sends by selecting distribution based on what they’ve already received.  For example, if someone is currently in a welcome sequence that offers a one time discount then you might want to make sure they don’t get broadcast emails at the same time so that the message doesn’t get diluted.

This also works in reverse.  If you’re offering a promotion through your email list then you might want to send more emails to those who have already shown an interest so you select those subscribers who have opened the last two emails for example and send them further information to help nudge them to take the leap and buy.

How to use segmentation to your advantage

In this day and age where companies are vying for attention in the inbox, you can be at the mercy of deliverability rates.  To help make sure your emails get a better chance of landing in the inbox, you might want to consider segmenting your audience by the response rate.

Sending to your most engaged subscribers (the ones who regularly open your emails) can mean you teach the bots that you’re sending good information and that people are responding.  It primes the bots to notice good open rates and as you open up your emails to more of your list, there’s a better chance of higher open rates all round because the emails are being delivered to the inbox instead of spam.

To segment or not segment?

As I mentioned before, there’s no need to segment - you can go about your business without segmenting. You want to make things as easy as possible for yourself since you’re probably wearing a lot of hats in your business. But it’s worthwhile starting to tag your audience for the future to allow for better engagement and being able to send more relevant emails... which mean higher sales.