Elsewhere in these Emailcome guides you’ve seen me refer to list segmentation, though so far we’ve just lightly touched on the subject. Now in this guide we’re going to fully delve into the subject so that you can start putting this strategy to work for you and reaping the benefits.
First things first, what is segmentation?
Segmentation is when you slice up your list into targeted segments. These segments may be based on a variety of factors, such as demographics, buying behavior and many more. (We’ll get into this in detail below.) The reason for doing this is because it lets you then send ultra-targeted content and offers to each segment of your list. In turn, this boosts your open rate, increases conversions and creates more loyal subscribers.
So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at the following tips, ideas, examples and insights that will help you get the right message to the right audience…
1. Six List-Segmentation Categories
As mentioned a moment ago, there are plenty of ways to segment your list. We’re going to start with a quick list of these many ways, and then later on in this guide you’ll discover more specifics about how to create and optimize these list segments.
Let’s start with an overview of how to segment your list:
By demographics. This includes things such as gender, age, location, marital status, whether they have kids and similar characteristics.
By behavior. This encompasses a wide variety of behaviors, from whether someone read your last email to how many products they’ve purchased from you to whether they read your blog posts. This also includes whether they attend events like webinars or participate in contests.
By survey answers. If you’re doing any market research, you may segment your list according to the answers. For example, if someone says they’re interested in specific topics in your niche (such as grooming a poodle or high-intensity interval training), then those topics are potential segments.
By entry point. Here you might segment your list according to how someone arrived onto your list. For example, did they buy a product? Did they attend a webinar? Did they sign up at an offline event?
By device. The idea here is to segment your list according to how they visit your website and read your emails. Do they visit on a smart phone or a desktop/laptop?
By status. This includes prospect, customer, or marketing partner.
Again, these are just some of the major categories. We’ll get into specifics later in this guide. But first, let’s create a plan…
RECOMMENDED! Click Here To… CREATE YOUR OWN PRODUCTS
2. Create a Segmenting Plan
Your first step is to decide what sort of segments you’re going to create for your list. In order to figure this out, you need to determine what types of segments will be most useful to your business.
Let’s take the example of segmenting by whether someone is visiting your device on a phone or a desktop. If you don’t sell phone apps, then this may not be that important to you.
Another example: let’s suppose your audience falls within a fairly narrow age range, such as 30 to 40 years old. Chances are, it’s not going to matter if someone is 35 or 40 – you probably won’t gain much from segmenting on such a narrow factor.
On the other hand, consider if your audience ranges in age from about 25 to 50. If you’re selling dieting information, then it’s VERY helpful to segment across these ages. That’s because a 25-year-old has different concerns, needs and abilities versus your over-40 crowd. For example, the 20-somethings may be primarily concerned about losing weight to look good, while the middle-age part of your audience may have health concerns.
You get the point. Here’s what you need to do: brainstorm all the different demographics, characteristics, and behaviors of your audience. Then decide if it’s important to create segments based on these differences.
3. The Question You MUST Ask Yourself Before Segmenting
Here’s the question: can I collect data on this particular point in order to segment my list?
Simply put, you can’t segment without collecting data. As such, you’ll need to determine if you’re able to collect the data necessary to create the segments you desire. For example, if there is information that’s not easily available, will your audience offer the information via a survey?
4. Choose the Right ESP
The next step you need to take is to choose the right Email Service Provider. Not every ESP gives you the tools to segment your list, so you want to be sure that you choose one that does.
Here are seven options for you:
- Aweber.com
- ConvertKit.com
- iContact.com
- ConstantContact.com
- FreshMail.com
- MailChimp.com
- GetResponse.com
This is by no means an exhaustive list (not even close), but these are among the most popular options.
NOTE: Some of these options create separate lists for each segments, while others let you “tag” a list segment (and then send separate emails to different tags). The main reason this is important is because of financial considerations, especially when your list grows large. If an ESP creates completely separate lists, then check if a subscriber is counted once for each list they appear on, or if a subscriber is counted once no matter how many lists on which they appear.
Next…
5. Segmenting Based on Surveys
The idea here is to ask your subscribers to take a survey, and then segment according to their answers. A tool like SurveyFunnel.com is designed to make it easy to segment your list based on surveys.
Here are three ideas:
- Ask your audience what topics interest them.
- Ask them about their pain points.
- Ask subscribers what solutions they’ve tried.
For example, if you know a segment of your audience is currently using a competitor’s product, you can send out an email that compares your product to the competitor’s product (and shows why your product is better and why they should switch).
Next…
6. Creating Demographic Segments
Some of this information you can collect silently when people sign up (such as their location based on their IP). In other cases, you can survey the audience to determine:
- Age
- Gender
- Geographic location
- Marital status
- Children or not
- Education level
- Career/job
- Income
For example, if you know someone is a 35-year old mother of two with a full-time job, then it’s a pretty good bet that she’s really busy. If you’re selling dieting information, you empathize with how busy she is, and how your diet guide is designed for buy moms who don’t have time to go to the gym or cook one meal for herself and another for the family.
7. 6 Ways to Segment Based on Buyer Behavior
How do you segment based on buyer behavior? Check out these ideas, where you segment your list based on:
- Whether a person is a prospect or a cash-paying customer.
- The exact product(s) the person has purchased.
- Whether he buyer always pays full price, sometimes pays full price, or always (and only) uses coupons.
- The last time a person purchased a product from you.
- The number of products a person has purchased from you.
- How much the customer generally spends on a product. (E.G., do they only buy low-ticket items? Do they only buy your premium offers? Or do they buy a bit of everything?)
For example, let’s suppose you segment your list according to specific purchases. If you’re going to send out a big promo for one of your products, then you can exclude anyone who’s already purchased the product.
8. 5 Examples of Engaging Customer Segments
You’ve collected data on buyer behavior. Now what do you do with this information? Check out these ideas:
- Reward long-time customers with special perks.
- Send onboarding messages to new customers.
- Send a re-engagement sequence to cold customers.
- Send special offers to segments that only buy when presented with a coupon or other discount.
- Ask long-time customers to send testimonials, share your content on social media, or refer their friends.
Next…
9. Splitting Your List into Traffic Sources
Still another way to segment your list is according to how they found your site. This includes SEO, partner traffic (affiliates), social media, paid advertising, offline methods, guest blogging, and so on.
TIP: In order to create these segments, you’ll need to create tracking links so that you know exactly how a person came to your lead page. For example, someone who comes to your site via a paid ad might visit the lead page link that looks like this: yourdomain.com/lead.html?ppc …. Whereas someone who comes via social media might come in on this link: yourdomain.com/lead.html?db
You can then “tag” these segments by tracking link, or set up different lists for different traffic sources, whatever is easiest with the tools you’re using.
For example, if you’re sending out a message to invite people to join you on Facebook, you can exclude the segment of your list who already follow you on Facebook.
10. Keep Your Prospecting Lists Separate
If you’re doing any email prospecting, which is where you find people who may be interested in what you offer and you contact them, then keep this list completely separate/segmented from your other lists. That’s because this is the only list you’ll have where you approached a prospect versus the other way around. In general, email prospecting is best reserved for finding marketing partners, as they’re more open to receiving unsolicited, cold emails.
Check out this next idea…
11. Save a Sale With Segmenting
Many shopping carts track people who already have accounts on your site, and then they give you the option to send an email to someone who abandons their cart before completing a purchase. You can remind these prospects to come back to complete their purchase, which will boost conversions. To further increase conversions, you may offer them a coupon code if they complete their purchase in the next 24 to 48 hours.
12. 2 Ways to Engage “Recent Activity” Segments
Many autoresponders, shopping carts and other tools let you segment your list based on the users’ recent activity. Here are two examples of how to engage these types of segments:
Send a relevant sequence to someone who clicked on a blog link. For example, if someone clicks through to your blog to read an article about DIY kitchen remodeling, you can then send them a sequence on the same topic.
Send a follow up depending on whether someone opened your last email. You can send additional information to those who opened it. To those who didn’t, you can send another email encouraging them to look at your offer (e.g., “last chance”).
Here’s the next segmenting strategy…
13. Engaging “Event” Segments
Another way to segment your list is according to whether the subscriber has participated in events. For example:
- Send follow up information to those who join a webinar, such as offering a recording and transcript of the webinar for a small fee.
- Select people who take part in a free Q&A group coaching session to get an invitation to take part in your personal one-on-one paid coaching program.
14. Keep Contestants Separate
Want to keep a clean, high-converting list? Then separate out people who initially joined your list via a contest. That’s because these folks something give you bad email addresses in order to enter your contest multiple times. Be sure to clean this list periodically (see Tip #17 below).
Next…
15. Optimize Partner Lists
When you start thinking about segmenting your lists, don’t limit yourself to segmenting your prospect and customer list. You’ll also to create partner lists, which separate your regular affiliates from your joint venture partners. You’ll also want to segment according to the following:
- Affiliates that have never promoted your offers.
- Affiliates that used to promote, but haven’t done so lately.
- Affiliates that promote, but make very few sales.
- Affiliates who promote and make a lot of sales (these are your super affiliates/partners).
For example, you might send an email to partners that haven’t promoted lately to invite them to take part in a contest or a coupon promo, which will motivate them to start sending you traffic again.
Another example: you can send out emails with special perks for your super affiliates and other best partners.
RECOMMENDED! Click Here To… GROW YOUR OWN CUSTOMER LIST
16. Send Out Birthday Messages
Ever notice that when your birthday rolls around, you get all sorts of messages from the companies and people with whom you do business? That’s because these birthday messages work. They engage (or even re-engage) and audience, plus they can spur sales if you include a special birthday discount or bonus.
17. Keep a Clean List
Whether you’re talking about partner lists, prospect lists, or customer lists, you want to keep a clean list. To that end, watch for inactive segments of your list. If someone hasn’t opened your emails for a month, send out a sequence to attempt to re-engage them with special offers, freemiums, perks, etc. If they don’t re-engage, then delete their email address from your list. Doing so will help boost your conversion rates and your sender reputation score.
Conclusion
You just discovered all sorts of tips, examples, insights and ideas for segmenting your list. Once you start segmenting, then the key to boosting response is to send out targeted content and offers.
For example, if you’re writing to busy moms, you can say things like this, “Sometimes you feel like you live in the car as you drive the kids back and forth between their practices, recitals and other activities…” This helps you connect emotionally with the reader and shows you understand their problems.
Another example: if you’re sharing information about how to travel and vacation with dogs, then you might segment your list based on how many and what sort of dogs your subscribers have. That’s because people who have multiple big dogs will have issues that small-dog owners won’t, such as finding a place that accepts three big dogs.
Point is, the more you know about your audience (and if you’re able to create segments based on what you know) the easier it will be to really connect with them every time you send an email!
Keep Reading: 17 Suggestions For Your Own Set It And Forget It Sales
Previous: 17 Things You Can Do Get People To Leave Their Inbox To Go To Your Site
Or… Click Here To Get Our #1 Recommendation To Start Earning Today.