Segmentation is the process of breaking your email list into sub-categories based on your subscribers’ unique characteristics, interests, and preferences. Sending a generic email blast to all your subscribers will not resonate with all your subscribers. Every subscriber is at a different level of readiness to convert into a customer. If you customize the emails based on different customer subcategories, you’ll produce better results because they will resonate with your customers.

How to Segment Email Lists

1. Demographics
   

   You can start with segmenting customers based on basics such as age, gender, and location. During the email sign-up process, the more information you can get about your audience the more options you’ll have for demographic segmentation. But be careful not to make the sign-up process too lengthy by asking too many questions as it can turn off certain customers. Focus on the most important questions only.

2. Email engagement

   Email engagement metrics such as Open Rate and Clickthrough Rate are important in keeping track of your email marketing success. Using these metrics, you can segment users as active vs inactive- someone who hasn’t opened your email in 3-4 months. And then you can create a customized campaign to re-engage the inactive users.

3. Past purchases
   

   Segmenting customers based on past purchases is another way where you start sending out email recommendations for similar items or accessories that would go well with their previous purchase. Or an email for a replacement, refil, or renewal of the product purchased in the past.

4. Amount Spent

   Use the customer amount spent history to classify customers into those who are likely to buy more expensive items and who are more interested in affordable, lower dollar items.

5. Position in the Sales Funnel
   

   Segmenting by where your audience is in the sales funnel is extremely important. Emails for a group of brand-new subscribers should be more generalized, giving a range of the products or features you offer. Whereas, for customers who have been signed up for a while, you should look at their previous activity and send more targeted emails.

6. Website behavior
   

   You can send targeted emails based on the specific pages your audiences visited. You can also send out targeted emails based on website activity, such as:

   •  Pages people visited
   • Pages they didn’t visit
   • People who visited one page but missed another related page
   • What videos they watched (and how long they watched them)
7. Time Since Last Purchase
   

   Time since last purchase is an important metric to classify customers who purchased recently and customers who purchased months ago. 

   1. Frequent Buyers
      

      This group purchases frequently and they trust and like your brand, so you target them by: 

      • Upselling products or plan upgrades.
      • Offering promotional deals.
      • Promoting new features or products.
   2. One-time Customers
      

      This group bought only once so your emails should be targeted at drawing them back to your brand by:

      • Offering personalized discounts on former purchases.
      • Highlighting the company’s positive attributes.
      • Sending reminders to renew/repurchase.

Read our other articles in our Series on Email Marketing:

• Top Reasons Successful Businesses Use Email Marketing
• How to Create an Email Marketing Strategy
• How to Build Your Email List
• Using Social Media to Grow Your Email List
• How to Send Marketing Emails the Right Way

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