3 Reasons Why Your Email Marketing Strategy Should Include Segmentation

Email marketing is a pretty unique platform when we look at what’s available in the digital space. 

With far more creative freedom than any other marketing platform, emails afford businesses the chance to connect with their customers on a far more personal level – without character limits and ad restrictions.

When we look at the predicted email marketing trends of 2021, we keep circling back to hyper-personalisation – and this is more than adding recipients’ first names into your subject lines.

What is trending is the utilisation of features that allow us to figure out key information about our audience, namely where they are on the customer journey, to target them with content that is relevant and valuable. 

Enter: segmentation. 

Send The Right Customers The Right Emails

The first reason why your email marketing strategy should include segmentation is that it is a simple way to ensure that you are providing your audience with relevant content. 

As a recipient, there’s nothing worse than having your inbox flooded by emails that you don’t want and don’t read.

As a business, there’s nothing worse than sending emails to people who don’t want them and don’t read them. 

Segmentation allows you to separate your mailing list based on customer profiles, i.e. gender, age, location (so long as you are collecting and have consent to use this information). You can also segment based on customer behaviour, i.e. highly engaged members of your mailing list, repeat buyers or win-back opportunities. 

Then, you can create content that you know will appeal to those specific segments of your audience.

But it doesn’t have to be complicated – even something as simple as sending emails to your 30-Day Engaged list rather than your entire newsletter list will be hugely beneficial because you’re filtering out the people who aren’t that interested. 

What’s more, it will help keep those oh-so-important metrics nice and high.

Boost Your Sender Reputation

And that brings us to the second reason why segmentation is such a crucial part of your email marketing strategy.

As a digital marketing agency, we often create email marketing strategies for brands who have never done email marketing before – or those who have, but who want to switch platforms and start fresh. 

In both of these cases, we formulate a strategy to help businesses gain an element of control over their key metrics and, in turn, their sender reputation. 

Whether you have never sent emails before or you are sending from a new platform, you have the opportunity to build a positive sender reputation. 

Email providers base your sender reputation on how your emails perform in terms of average open and click rates; this is a crucial aspect of your email deliverability.

So, the first thing we do is set up automated emails that are high-engagement flows such as welcome series, abandoned carts and abandoned browse. This helps establish your sender reputation because people are highly likely to open and engage with these emails. 

Following this, we can segment our most engaged recipients and start sending our campaign emails to them, ensuring that we keep those key metrics high. 

Without this type of segmentation, you run the risk of sending to unengaged customers and dropping your engagement metrics or even increasing your spam reports. 

As we said, email marketing is all about creating a relationship with your customers, and if your sender reputation is poor, you may not even get the chance to try. 

So, how else can segmentation enhance your relationship with your customers?

Well, if used correctly, it can make them feel valued. 

Tell Your Customers You Value Them

This brings us on to the third and final reason why you must include segmentation as part of your email marketing strategy, which is that it lets your customers know how much you value them.

A prime example of this would be your VIP customer list or your repeat buyers. 

Particularly when it comes to small businesses, these people are your people: the ones who keep coming back for more, the ones who make you carry on doing what you’re doing. 

Plus, segmentation allows you to pick them out of the crowd and say thank you. 

Hint: a hefty discount usually does the trick! 

So, what more can we say?

Personalisation in email marketing is trending, and we highly recommend that you jump on the bandwagon – even with something as simple as segmenting your most engaged audience members. 

Trust us, it will make all the difference. 

If you would like support with your email marketing strategy, contact The Good Marketer today.