Marketing that lacks the right context is basically useless. If you’ve signed up for a company’s email newsletter expecting to receive helpful content and tips but are constantly being sent sales material, you’d probably unsubscribe. That’s why email segmentation is so important.
What is Email Segmentation?
Email segmentation, also known as list segmentation, is the practice of sorting business contacts into different lists based on their characteristics. This ensures that they’ll only receive email marketing messages that are relevant to them, and, in an ideal situation, nurture them further along the buyer’s journey until they become customers.
There are tons of ways to segment email lists, but some of the most common are based on the following:
- Geography
- Buyer persona
- Stage in sales funnel
- Business industry
- Job title
3 Key Benefits of Segmenting Email Lists
1. Contextual Marketing
The biggest benefit of email segmentation is the opportunity to deliver highly-contextualized marketing materials to leads and customers.
Your customers are not all the same, so their expectations from your email marketing campaigns differ. By having them segmented into lists based on their stage in your sales funnel, for example, you can deliver hot leads a follow-up sales email at the perfect time.
Emails delivered within the proper context can do the following:
- Improve open and click-through rates
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Build valuable relationships
- Drive revenue
2. Experimentation
Email marketing is improved through experiments known as A/B tests, in which two versions of an email are sent, with one variable (subject line, call-to-action, etc.) differing between them. Afterwards, the two versions are analyzed to see which performs best.
You can further segment an existing list and deliver a different version of an email to each to conduct your own A/B tests.
3. Remarketing
No business converts 100 percent of its leads right off the bat. Sometimes, they need a little bit more incentive to actually become customers.
Segmented email lists can be uploaded to remarketing programs so the contacts in them will see ads for your business as they navigate the internet. This is a valuable supplement to any email marketing campaign.
How to Get Started with List Segmentation
It’s difficult to find the time to manually sift through thousands of contacts and segment them into different lists. That’s why many businesses have adopted some sort of marketing automation software to streamline the process.
Programs like HubSpot can automatically sort contacts into different lists as they come in, and update them based on changes to their properties. Then, when you want to send an email blast to a certain list, all you have to do is check off a box. It’s simple and very effective.
If you’re thinking about introducing email segmentation into your business’ marketing mix, do it! It’s one of the few marketing tactics that can help just about any business, regardless of size or industry.
