Target Email Marketing — Best Email List Segmentation Strategies

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Every customer shops differently. This is one of the tenets of email marketing that define your overall strategy. 

The one-email-fits-all approach can’t generate optimal results because a generic message isn’t enough to engage your audience. Personalization has become a fundamental element of every email campaign because your contacts want to be treated as human beings valuable to your business. Consider the fact that 52% of your customers will probably turn to your competition for a solution if you don’t incorporate personalization elements into your emails.

Email marketing is a powerful method for building relationships with your prospects. It’s nearly 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined when it comes to customer acquisition. 

If you want to make the most of email marketing’s capabilities, you need to use targeted email marketing and apply the best list segmentation strategies.

Let’s start by answering two fundamental questions:

1. What is targeted email marketing?

2. What are the benefits of targeted email marketing?

What Is Targeted Email Marketing?

Targeted email marketing goes hand in hand with email list segmentation. It consists of sending highly targeted emails to specific contact groups segmented based on a wide range of characteristics. 

This approach enables you to customize your emails and make them as relevant and valuable as possible to a particular audience. According to the statistics, sending personalized emails based on list segmentation results in a 46% higher open rate on average, in comparison to generic promotional messages.

Creating targeted email campaigns isn’t a complicated task if you use the right email marketing software.

What Are the Benefits of Targeted Email Marketing?

There are plenty of benefits when it comes to creating personalized email messages for a highly targeted audience. Some of the most important ones revolve around the so-called five Rs of targeted email marketing. These are:

Determining the Data You Need for Target Email Marketing

Before you start segmenting your lists, you need to collect different types of information on your prospects. This includes:

• Personal characteristics — demographics, psychographics, firmographics, etc.

• Specific user actions — opening an email, clicking on a CTA or link, downloading a lead magnet, abstaining from performing an action, etc.

• Shopping behavior — browsing habits, recent purchases, shopping cart abandonment, etc.

Creating a Customer Persona

Once you’ve determined the data that you require, you need to create customer personas for each segmented contact group. 

A customer persona is a detailed representation of a member of your target audience. It’s a fabricated person that has the characteristics of your optimal customer. The common practice is giving them a name and specific details such as interests, demographics, and behavioral traits. 

Creating a customer persona will enable you to determine different aspects, such as the:

• Form of messages you’re going to send

• Kind of voice you’re going to use

• Type of content you’re going to provide

• Category of products you’re going to offer

There is a wide range of strategies for segmenting your contact lists. They can focus on specific factors or combine them for more advanced targeting. Let’s take a look at some of the most effective approaches.

Target Email Marketing Based on Geolocation

There are various ways that you can use geo-targeted email marketing to segment your contact lists. This approach is particularly useful if the location is a crucial factor for how your contacts make purchasing decisions. You can send targeted email based on:

• Time zones — Sending emails at opportune times depending on which time zone the recipient’s location belongs to

• Local promotions — Promoting location-specific events, such as conferences and trade shows

• Brick and mortar shops — Providing discounts and special offers related to stores that specific customers visit frequently

• National holidays — Creating special promotions for location-specific holidays and festivals

Target Email Marketing Based on the Customer Journey Stage

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Your emails need to follow your prospects during their customer journey and provide them with adequate types of content. The links and resources that you should send them depend on whether they’re in one of the following stages:

1. Awareness

2. Consideration

3. Decision

Awareness Stage

Prospects in the awareness stage know that they’ve got a problem, but they’re still looking for ways to learn more about it. Your emails should provide them with educational content such as:

• Videos

• Articles

• Blog posts

• Infographics

• Interactive quizzes

Consideration Stage

A lead enters the consideration stage when they start looking for solutions to their problem actively. This is the perfect opportunity for you to provide them with relevant content that can help them learn more about specific solutions and point them in your direction. Your email campaign should focus on:

• Ebooks

• Webinars

• Newsletters

• Case studies

• Event promotions

Decision Stage

At this stage, your recipients are ready to make a purchase. This is your opportunity to present them with your products or services as the best solutions to their problem. You should start sending them:

• Reviews

• Testimonials

• Special offers

• Product demos

• Free trials

Target Email Marketing Based on Interests

You can focus your list segmentation on specific user interests and provide offers that particular leads will be the most interested in. You need to collect the necessary information for this type of targeting by tracking different brand interactions.

Let’s say that you’re running a retail store that focuses on shirts. You’ll have customers looking for different products, such as overshirts, dress shirts, denim shirts, flannel shirts, etc. You can start by sending broader offers to your contacts and create contact groups based on specific CTAs in your emails. When a recipient shows an interest in denim shirts, you can email them different offers in that category and keep them up to date with any new products.

Target Email Marketing Based on Email Engagement

Email engagement is one of the most important aspects of your email campaigns. It can be a valuable factor for creating targeted emails. The two crucial aspects you need to track are:

• Open rate

• Click-through rate

Your emails’ open rate can help you segment users based on their activity. If a prospect hasn’t opened your emails in a few months, you can label them as inactive and create specific campaigns for re-engaging them.

You can base your campaigns on recipients that engage by clicking on your CTAs. Every contact that reaches a specific page by clicking on a call-to-action can be added to a contact group labeled as interested. This enables you to create optimal campaigns that provide them with valuable content based on their clicks.

Target Email Marketing Based on Past Purchases

The most common approach when it comes to segmenting your lists based on past purchases is to create contact groups that you can send recommendations for similar products to. You can both upsell and cross-sell products.

You can use this targeting method for even more specific groups. If a customer purchases an item that needs to be refilled or replaced eventually, you can set up target emails to meet their future requirements. 

Let’s say that your customer buys printer cartridges. You can estimate when they might run out of ink and send them an email to let them know that you’ve got them covered. Throw in a discount, and you’ll increase the chances of customer retention.

Target Email Marketing Based on Website Actions

You need to track your website visitors’ actions to gather more information about their needs and interests. You can use a website tracking tool such as Leadfeeder. This enables you to craft emails based on a variety of actions — or lack thereof — including:

• Visiting specific pages and not visiting others

• Spending a certain amount of time on a page

• Scrolling down a page a particular number of times

• Clicking on specific CTAs and links

• Watching a certain type of videos

You can also segment your contacts based on what channel they used to subscribe to your email list. This will enable you to send them more relevant content. If a person subscribed from your blog, they’ll probably be interested in getting to know more about your business. If they signed up from a products page, they’ll more likely want to receive emails with updates and special offers.

Target Email Marketing Based on Purchase Frequency

Segmenting your contacts based on how often they purchase from you is crucial because you can’t send the same types of offers to both your:

1. One-time customers

2. Frequent customers

One-Time Customers

This group includes customers such as those that:

• Bought a product a year ago and haven’t returned since

• Purchased your products for a certain period and then stopped

Your goal is to re-engage them through various kinds of promotional messages, such as personalized discounts and reminders that include relevant products.

Frequent Customers

This group consists of customers that purchase your products relatively often. In this case, your emails should focus on customer retention and offer enticing incentives, such as product upgrades and promotional deals.

Target Email Marketing Based on Demographics

Another way to segment your mailing list is by focusing on demographic characteristics such as:

• Age

• Gender

• Education

• Occupation

• Income level

• Family makeup

You can gather most of this information via your signup forms. The more data you collect, the more specific segmentation you will be able to achieve. Keep in mind that you need to be careful about how much you ask right away. Long subscription forms that ask for too much personal information are more likely to scare people off. 

You need to decide which details matter to you the most from the get-go. Let’s say that you’re running a clothing retail shop. You’ll want to know the prospect’s gender to be able to offer them appropriate products. If you’re running a toy store, your priority will be the prospect’s age or family makeup. 

Your customers’ income level is an essential factor for companies that sell both expensive and affordable products.

You can get the essential information through your signup form and collect other details via follow-up emails. When a person subscribes to your mailing list, you can send them a welcome email asking them to create a profile on your website. This is where they can insert additional personal data that you can use for advanced segmentation. Motivate them to complete their profile by letting them know how they can benefit from including as many details as they can.

Automating Personalized Email Sequences for Your Segmented Contact Groups

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Once you’ve segmented your contact list into specific groups and gathered all the necessary information for creating personalized customer journeys, you need the proper software for setting up automated email sequences. You should find an autoresponder tool that can help you create:

1. Drip email campaigns

2. Trigger email campaigns

Drip Email Campaigns

A drip email campaign is based on sending a sequence of emails during a predefined period. It’s an efficient method for nurturing leads and moving them down the sales funnel. You can schedule email campaigns for different purposes, such as:

• Creating onboarding sequences

• Retaining customers

• Re-engaging old leads

• Upselling and cross-selling products

One of the primary reasons why drip campaigns work is that they provide structure. Your contacts like to know what they can expect from you. If you start with an engaging email, they’ll be hooked and await any follow-ups.

Trigger Email Campaigns

Trigger email campaigns are automatic responses to specific events and user actions. Instead of having to track user behavior manually, you can set up automated sequences based on triggers such as:

• Subscribing to your mailing list

• Clicking on a specific CTA or link

• Purchasing a product or service

• Spending a particular amount of time on a webpage

• Abandoning a shopping cart

• Abstaining from performing any action

Why You Should Try Our Autoresponder Solution for Targeted Email Marketing

Our Sell SaaS software bundle includes a powerful email campaign creator with an autoresponder feature. You can use it to craft high-quality email campaigns in a simple online editor. Once you’ve set up your emails, you can automate both drip and trigger campaigns. The tool also includes a tracking feature, enabling you to determine the deliverability rate for every email campaign.

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