If you’re sending regular emails to your audience, you’re already taking steps in the right direction. In fact, email continues to be a main source of new customer acquisition and retention for small to medium-sized businesses. That said, if you’re not segmenting your campaigns, you’ll be losing out on some valuable engagement metrics. According to Mailchimp’s user data, we’ve found that segmenting your audience lists and delivering more customized messaging can net over 14% better open rates and over 60% more clicks. Imagine the difference that could make!
While it may seem like a BIG task to segment your audience lists and start creating custom content based off of those segments, there are a ton of different approaches you can take. Check out a few key email marketing segmentation strategies you can start building out today.
Stage of the Sales Funnel
This is perhaps one of the most beneficial ways you can start to segment your email marketing strategy. Whether you’re a B2B company or a B2C retailer or service provider, your audience will be looking for different categories of information and respond to different types of messaging depending on where they are in the sales journey. Users that are brand new to your company should receive more general information, while users that are further along in your process may require more specific details like product line comparisons or testimonials. This can be done by segmenting users based on the forms that are filled out, creating drip email strategies, or by integrating your CRM with your email marketing platform.
Website Behavior
If you’re using a platform like HubSpot, you can tie user behavior through your website to specific automated drip email campaigns based on the pages they are viewing, as well as the pages they aren’t viewing. Certain resource areas of your website may be great triggers to send things like whitepapers or targeted testimonials as a part of an ongoing lead nurturing campaign. Experimenting with the types of content you are sending based on where your users are going on your site is a great way to help guide your audience through the sales funnel.
Engagement
Simple drip campaigns are a great way to help customize the lead nurturing path your users are going down. Anticipating their behavior by measuring and responding to their engagement levels is a great way to not only capitalize on users that are engaging well with your content but also help bring unengaged users back into the fold. Specialized campaigns that are targeted for users that haven’t opened or engaged with your emails for a period of three months may give good insight on how to keep users engaged while also re-engaging with users that might have completely left your sales cycle otherwise.
Job Function
If you’re a B2B company with a lead generation and nurturing campaign, the ability to segment your audience lists by job function will allow you to tailor your messaging for your different buyer personas and elevate your email marketing campaigns to a whole new level. Understanding how your sales-ready messaging will vary depending on what decision makers you are engaging with is the key to personalizing your messaging and cutting through the clutter that is almost guaranteed to be filling their inboxes. It’s also a great way to test and validate the messaging you are using for those users across all your marketing channels.
At Saturn Lounge, we’ve seen great success in creating targeted email campaigns based on advanced user segmentation. If you’re looking to level up your email marketing strategy and create a more highly personalized journey for your email subscribers, get in touch, we’d love to work with you!