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With all the marketing strategies available today, it’s email marketing, the oldest, that remains the most impactful. Email marketing can boost your revenue by 320% and it’s 40x more effective for acquiring new customers compared to Facebook or Twitter.
So, it’s important to build an email list from the very beginning and to make use of your list carefully. Let’s explore why you should build your email list more deeply.
Think about when you walk down a street, whether it’s one that’s familiar or unfamiliar. You see signboards and advertisements all around you. Many of them even catch your eye and you may think to yourself ‘That’s interesting! I should check it out someday.’ And you move on.
Chances are that you’ve already forgotten about the businesses you’ve passed by in a few minutes. A few days later, you have virtually no memory of the businesses and products you’ve encountered.
Your brand’s impact and memorability are very low online. Consider the analogy we just used. Suppose you walk along a street and see a special offer that’s eye-catching. Maybe, the owner of a business personally explains what they’re offering. You have a helpful conversation where you learn more about their product. They may even give you a flyer or a discount coupon and send you more information by mail. It’s far more likely that you’ll remember the business and even consider buying something from it.
Building an email list is a way to remind your audience that your business can help them. By sending regular and informative emails you boost the chance of winning customers. And the more you can personalize your emails the better you’ll do.
One of the best ways to personalize your emails is to segment it. This means grouping your email subscribers into segments based on certain characteristics.
When you segment your email list, you:
- Understand your audience well
- Send personalized content
- Increase engagement with your audience
- Boost conversions
- Reduce getting your mails marked as spam
There are several email segmentation strategies that you can adopt to divide your email list into groups. Here are some effective strategies that you can use in 2024 and connect with your audience better.
Create groups while subscribing
One of the best ways to automatically segment your email list is to allow your subscribers to add themselves to ‘Groups’. Look for email marketing service providers that have such a group feature.
When a person subscribes to your email list, they can add themselves to their preferred groups during the sign-up process.
There are many publications, take Medium for example, that give users the option to choose the type of content they want to see and receive. People add themselves to groups by selecting their ‘Interests’.
Your subscribers will feel like their input is important and that they can expect only relevant content from you. You’ll also build an automatic database where you know what kind of information your audience wants.
You can set up groups for email subscribers by using a form plugin and integrating it with an email marketing service tool. Then build a registration form or a sign up form and give users the option to pick their preferred content.
When it’s time for you to send your email blasts, you can curate your blog posts and send specific topics to each segment. Your email subscribers get exactly the content they asked for and you build a solid relationship with them.
By asking your users to group themselves, you’re creating zero-party data. You’re asking your users for data directly and your audience is giving it to you with consent and with the expectation that they will receive a benefit in return. This benefit will be in the form of personalized communication and offers.
Your audience will appreciate the value they’re getting and you’ll boost your brand image too.
Use Recency, Frequency, Monetary Analysis
RFM or recency, frequency, and monetary analysis is used in marketing to determine which customers provide the most value.
- Recency refers to how recently a customer bought from you. Customers who bought more recently are better targets for email marketing than ones that bought a long time ago
- Frequency refers to how often certain members of your audience buy from your business or engage with you
- The monetary element has to do with much a customer spends on your business. You can also look at a customer’s purchasing power and their intention to buy from you
Using RFM is a helpful way for you to segment your customers and it makes a great deal of sense. Your existing subscribers who score high on the RFM scale are more likely to respond well to your messages.
Another way to use RFM is to identify customers who have not bought from you for a long time or who are one-time buyers. Customers who buy small value items infrequently take considerable effort to rouse into action. In such cases, it’s best to avoid reaching out to these segments altogether. They are more likely to mark your business as spam and may develop negative feelings towards your business.
So, segmentation doesn’t just help you target the right people with the right message. It also helps you avoid emailing those groups that will not respond well to your marketing messages.
Doing an RFM analysis depends on the data you already have. You need reports and data from your CRM, purchase history, email marketing analytics, and other reporting tools.
By using RFM, you’ll be able to create several segments and group your existing subscribers into tiers. This creates a number of segments which allow you to send highly-targeted email messages. As a result, you’ll see better open rates and conversions through your email marketing.
Work With Demographics
Targeting your email marketing based on demographics is another form of personalization. One important way to target your content is to tailor it differently for Millennials, Gen-Z, and the Boomer generation.
Here are some marketing statistics that showcase how significant the Millennial generation is in the market:
- Millennials spend $600 billion every year in the USA alone. In 2024, Millennial spending is expected to hit around $1.4 trillion
- Millennials make more than half of their purchases online
- And 41% of Millennials have completed an in-store transaction with their mobile device.
These points tell us how important it is to segment our lists according to demographic data. When we address the different age groups and life experiences within our lists, we’re able to send relevant and tailored messages that create the most responses.
There are other ways to segment your email marketing list based on demographics that are more obvious. Details like age, income, gender and other information about your audience will help you.
You’d be able to send messages to moms that are different to what you’d send to a young student starting college.
To help you segment your list according to demographics, you can add a short survey form during sign up by asking your subscribers for such details. You can also rely on your website’s Google Analytics set up to help you generate reports on the demographics visiting your site. In this way, you’re able to effectively segment your list and send out winning emails that your audience will love.
Split Test Your Email Marketing Messages
With the segmentation strategies already mentioned, you’ll find that you can create a large number of segments or groups. Having multiple segments based on carefully collected and analyzed data allows you to personalize your email messages to a large degree.
A case study on Taylor Stitch shows how creating several segments RFM analysis shows how segmentation led to a 60% decrease in unsubscribes. The company creates around 50 segments a month and has increased its revenue by 60% per recipient.
A key for the success of this email marketing strategy was carrying out testing. Only a portion of the already segmented groups received emails with content that was relevant to their activities. Doing split testing allowed the business to learn how their audience would respond to such targeted marketing.
Carrying out an A/B Split Test on your segments and verifying that you’re taking the right steps will help you refine your segments even further. You’ll learn from the experience and improve how well your email marketing is received. The end goal of any business is to create revenue and profits, and by using these methods you create the best possibility for that to happen.
Conclusion
Email marketing remains the oldest and the most effective marketing strategy there is to create conversions. People rely on their emails for information that is significant to their lives. You can provide value through your marketing messages by creating personalized content.
Remember to start segmenting your email list from the very beginning. You can use CRM tools and Analytics to help you do this. We’ve also showcased other important ways to segment your email list and help you send awesome personalized content to your readers.
By following the methods given here, you’re bound to see significant improvements. So, why wait? Get started and grow your business today!
