How to Segment Audiences for Email Marketing

admin

3 min read

Updated: July 20th, 2023

Want to know how you can segment your audience for your email marketing campaigns? Learn how to do it in seven easy steps.

Sending an email blast to a list of customers without understanding their needs and priorities is not only wasteful of time, energy, and resources, but it also risks customers having a bad impression of your brand.

To make sure you’re only sending relevant information, it’s important to segment customers based on commonalities.

Some of the common factors that bind customers together are their interests, age, gender, and company industry. When you segment customers together based on these commonalities, it helps you understand customers’ challenges better.

You’re also 130% more likely to know their intentions, according to research, which helps you launch a more responsive sales and marketing strategy.

How Does Email Segmentation Work

Email segmentation works by dividing your email lists into smaller “segments” based on certain criteria such as age, sex, interests, buying intention, etc.

No two customers are the same. That’s why it’s important to understand why a customer subscribed to your email list and what type of information they want to get in the future.

One of your subscribers may find promotional offers and discounts helpful, while others may only want guides or expert advice coming from you.

By separating these two apart, you ensure that you only send information that is relevant to a target segment— promotional offers to the audience that actively looks for promos, and expert advice to the audience that only wants to get advice from you.

What is the Best Way to Segment Customers

Here’s how you can start segmenting your audience:

1. Gather as much information about your customers as possible

The first step to segmenting customers is to identify first who they are. Gathering as much information about them as possible. More data can help you in your analysis. 

Through surveys, you can gather details like location, interests, buying habits, and your customers’ demographics. The information you get from your customers will help you learn how to improve your products and services, and how best to provide value to the market. 

Tools like digital ecosystems and customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help you massively when doing this. 

2. Divide your audience based on commonalities

After gathering important data about your customers, the next step is to divide your audience into segments, based on commonalities. Find the common features among your audience. And be sure to keep each segment distinct from the others.

3. Create customer personas

Customer personas are more accurate representations of your customers based on data and information you’ve gathered from them and the market. It helps you design content that is responsive and relevant to them and their values.

When creating personas, try to identify the friction points between your business and your target customers. Address the objections that they may have to your product or service and prepare to address future concerns. Match your brand’s voice to your customer personas’ preferred communication styles.

4. Explore customer needs

After crafting your customer personas, the next step is to understand your customers’ needs at a deeper level. This includes digging deeper into your audience’s desires, value systems, and even needs that your customers do not know themselves.

This can be done through surveys at stages through progressive profiling. You can also include a customer feedback loop to know more about your customers’ thoughts and experiences with your brand. You can also delve deeper into what your customers think about your competitors’ products and services.

Another thing to note about customer needs is that you can identify them by determining research keywords, search terms, and frequently asked questions (FAQs) related to your product. This helps you know more about your customers’ needs without asking them directly about these needs.

5. Link your product and service value to customer needs

The next step is to connect the needs of your consumers with your brand’s product or service. 

This is where sales and marketing step in. Try to highlight how your products and services address the pain points of your customers. And how it can deliver value over time.

6. Prioritize high-value segments 

Some segments offer higher value than others— meaning, that in terms of sales, they generate higher value than other segments. Channel your focus on these segments. And prioritize these groups when you have to invest in sales and marketing efforts.

7. Evaluate your strategies

All strategies have to be evaluated at the end to ensure they work. Strategies cost companies resources to run, so make sure they’re delivering results. 

Start Segmenting Your Email List

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