11 Effective Email Marketing Segmentation Strategies to Try Today

Email marketing is one of the most effective business tools, period.

The reason?

People like receiving regular updates about brands and companies they love.

In fact, marketers have reported an increase in their email open rates when they used email personalization.

With that in mind, it’s difficult to understand why only 30% of online brands utilize this tactic.

Fortunately, after reading this post, you won’t be one of the 70% of marketers who miss out on the benefits of email segmentation and personalization.

When you want to grow your brand or sell your product, email marketing is one of the most popular and effective tools around for marketing campaigns.

So, what’s it all about?

Figuring out the best way to segment your email list can feel like a huge undertaking.

To make it a little less difficult, here are 11 quick and easy segmentation strategies that you can implement today.

The key is to identify which demographic data segments are most relevant to your business and how best to utilize the opportunities segmentation gives you.

Let’s look at a few examples:

Email engagement is a super simple way to segment your lists, and with the right tools, like systeme.io, you won’t even need to go further than your dashboard to access the information.

Segmenting by engagement source can greatly impact the results you get from email segmentation.

Let’s have a look at the 3 most common ways to gauge engagement:

A simple way to segment your email subscribers is through using geographic location data.

If you’re a business that relies on location data, this could be a valuable tool for you.

Here are some ways that you can use geographic data to segment your email list:

Look at your customers’ purchase history to see what products they’re interested in, and promote related products in your emails.

For example, if you have a multi-brand online store, you can send targeted campaigns to your users that show deals on their favorite brands.

This type of email is highly relevant because the content is based on your user’s behavior.

What’s great about this is that it’s a segmentation strategy that all ecommerce sites can use — from fitness stores to online gaming.

Keeping your email campaigns relevant will also reduce your unsubscribe rate.

Another way to segment by purchase history is to offer refills on previously bought items.

Items can include anything from shampoo to dog food.

Let’s take Thrive Market as an example. The subscription service lets you buy products from their catalog, then offers the chance to repeat the order automatically:

Calculate the approximate time it takes for a customer to use the product, and send them a friendly reminder to restock when they’re about to run out.

Or, simply offer them the opportunity to make recurring orders based on their past purchases.

Segmenting subscribers based on how they were added to your email list is an uncommon, yet effective, strategy.

If you run your own online business, you probably have multiple ways for people to opt-in to your email list — and if not, we recommend you get started!

Experimenting with different call-to-actions (CTAs) and incentives provide your audience with a personalized experience, enabling you to segment them and target them with relevant offers.

Let’s take a coupon code signup form as an example:

The chances are that if your new customers enter their details, they have a high purchase intent.

You can generate targeted emails that provide them with personalized content based on what would drive them to make the final purchase.

This can be something like offering another 5% discount on the pre-existing 30% discount.

Using this is a great way to engage with new subscribers and create loyal customers who know what amazing value you offer.

Be mindful of the fact that there is one disadvantage with discounts — if you give them too often, your subscribers may grow accustomed to them being there and never pay full price again.

There’s a fine balance when it comes to offering discounts.

Another way you can implement your email segmentation strategy is by looking at how you structure your lead magnets.

Lead magnets don’t offer an immediate commercial intent, and they’re usually given at the informational stage of your funnel.

Here are a few examples of how you can maximize your lead magnets:

If you have a lead magnet that offers a free guide to weekly meal planning, you can send your active subscribers more cooking tips and recipes along with offers on cooking equipment.

Protip: If you don’t offer cooking equipment, you can always promote products that you have an affiliate code for.

You know your subscribers are interested in fitness and well-being, so you can send them content on optimizing their workout and offer them products that help them do so.

When you offer a resource to a subscriber, you should include it in the first email you send them.

Someone at the top of the funnel should receive different targeted emails than the ones at the bottom of the funnel.

Let’s go through another example:

Say you have a large group of subscribers opt-in to your email sequence — you want to start by providing them with more generalized emails.

These types of emails can include:

If they stick around and interact with your emails, you can automatically add them to smaller groups in your marketing funnel.

This will result in them receiving targeted email marketing campaigns and getting to know your business on a more personal level — you can guide them through the buying process.

Cart abandonment is a good indication that someone’s at the bottom of the funnel.

A 2020 report found that the average cart abandonment rate is 75,6%.

This presents you with an opportunity to qualify your contact list by reminding them that they still have something left in their cart.

If they want to buy from you, they will, and if their cart remains abandoned, you know that you can recapture them with non-segmented campaigns.

These personas usually have different needs and respond differently to various email copies.

By targeting the buyers in the relevant segments, you’ll increase your buyer satisfaction level.

Segmentation enables you to create targeted email lists by separating your subscribers into various buyer personas and looking at:

After your welcome email, you can always send a follow-up email to ask your audience to indicate their preferences.

This way, you can create customer-based email segments and cut through the noise by targeting their real interests.

When a customer spends a certain amount of money on your store, you can send them an email with a gift or another type of reward.

You can implement the same strategy with loyalty points — these points can be used to redeem rewards, discounts, etc.

Looking at your website behavior is a simple way to gain more information about visitor interests.

A great way to segment users is by sending them emails based on the specific pages they visit.

But that’s not all — use behavioral data to determine:

To aid you in your segmentation journey, you want to equip yourself with a powerful marketing tool.

Of course, there are many other tools you can use.

Some will have more robust options than others, and some will be specific to your industry.

For now, let’s cover the basics.

Systeme.io is the all-in-one tool that you didn’t know you needed.

Our software comes equipped with email marketing tools that will enable you to segment your email lists in no time!

We also offer tools that will help you to build, grow, and scale your business.

These tools include (but aren’t limited to):

Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform that allows you to create, send, and analyze email and ad campaigns.

The software offers:

SendGrid is a cloud-based SMTP provider that allows you to send emails without having to maintain email servers.

SendGrid manages all the technical details of email marketing, from scaling to ISP outreach and reputation monitoring.

The tool offers the following features: