If you pay attention to overarching trends in marketing, you might have noticed that personalization is something that dramatically gained importance in the few last years. In email marketing, this is not any different. 

In fact, as competition grows fiercer and fiercer, businesses must provide extra attention to their best customers while “getting rid” of prospects  lurkers who have no purchase intent even though they signed up to a newsletter. 

This is exactly where list segmentation comes handy.

Segmentation as a whole is a really broad topic and you can segment both your prospects (market segmentation) as well as your existing customers. 

This article is about the latter and with a focus on email marketing.

In short, grouping your email list subscribers based on their behavior helps you automate and personalize your messaging at scale.

This is important also from the perspective of email deliverability. The more accurate and targeted your emails are, the better user experience, thus meaning higher open and click-through rates. The higher these are, the less emails in spam. The less emails in spam, the higher your overall domain reputation. This reputation is something you definitely don’t want to put at risk. Once you mess this up, it can be hard to fix it. 

Also before you start with behavioral segmentation of your list, keep in mind that people can belong to multiple segments at the same time. 

Now, let’s get a bit more specific and let’s take a look at the most basic example I can think of when it comes to list segmentation. 

Let’s say you want to run a Valentine’s Day Promo with a mid-price point, $40 product  

Before you start blasting emails to a 50k email list, the first question to ask yourself should be:

“how many people out of 50k names would be the most inclined to buy”?

You’ll find the answer to that question if you get familiar with a marketing term called Recency. However surprising it may sound, if you look at buying behavior from the perspective of the Recency metric, the more recently someone bought something, the more likely they are to buy again. Say what? Yep, I know.

Before, I used to think that if someone has just bought something, they would not be likely to buy again any time soon. They now have no money, right? Wrong. The saying “striking iron while it’s hot” seems to be relevant here. 

So now that you know who to look for…

You can create a few segments that will include people who are most likely to buy during your promo. For example:

1. People who bought in the last 14 and 30 days ( that’s the aforementioned Recency)
2. Those whose orders had the highest value (even if their last purchase was more than 30 days ago). This metric is called Monetary Value.
3. People with the overall highest number of orders (Frequency)

Now that you have your target segments, you can begin writing more relevant emails and turn those one-time customers into loyal brand advocates.

Now, here’s the next step to consider…

If you’ve got a weird feeling that you’re leaving money on the table because people skip past your emails/ads and you want an extra set of trained, brown and charming eyeballs to look at your stuff, I might be the guy you want to schedule for a free copy-audit. You can book it here: https://calendly.com/oscarolczakcopywriting/30min

You can also share this article with someone you think could benefit from reading it or leave a comment below. Because why not ?