Benefits of Segmenting Email Lists

Video Transcript:

“Let’s talk about effective strategies and techniques that’ll help you to segment your list. And I’d like to start with the basics, so I’d love it if you could talk about what segmentation is, and why is it really so important?

It is important because everybody wants to be talked to as if they were the most important person in the room. In other words, segmenting is the practice of splitting your email list into smaller, targeted groups that have something in common, which allows you to send them content that speaks to their needs or their requirements.

The benefit to that, as it shows on the slide, is that you’re going to get better engagement. Engagement meaning people are actually reading your emails and are interested in it. That is apparent in the number, the increased, uh, opens and clicks on an email. If you are looking to sell something online, you’ll get a better conversion, which means increased revenue, uh, because the emails speak to these people more specifically. Your unsubscribe rate will go down, and you get a better customer retention. So, the bottom line of segmenting is it gets you better results.

And no matter who you are or what your organization is, you really can be segmenting your list and, and doing more personalization to improve those results.

So, how do you figure out really which strategy is going to be best for your organization a- and get started with this whole process?

It’s a question of starting simple and small. Uh, you know, you may have a list, whether it’s 100 people, 1,000 people, 10,000 people. Start with a very simple segmentation, such as customers versus prospects, East Coast versus West Coast, people who have bought a certain product or service and people who have not. And just start with one simple segmentation and see what the result is. Chances are you’re going to see better performance in your email, and then you can take it to the next level and add another layer of segmentation.

So, for example, customers in Minnesota and customers in Montana, uh, and see if there’s a different there. The thing to keep in mind is what segmentation makes sense for your business. Whether it’s a service or you’re selling a product, it’s really a question of understanding which are the biggest segments in your customers and prospects, and what kind of messaging would be more relevant to each of them?

Definitely. And I like this point too here on the screen, is understanding your customer or supporter life cycle. So, I know Gabby, uh, she’s helping behind the scenes, but she does some photography on the side. And so she does some maternity photos and family photos, and, you know, people have different stages of their life cycle. So, when you’re targeting your messages, you really want to make sure that you’re understanding that people may move from those different segments, too, and that can help you better off with your segmentation and personalization as well.”