Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your audience and drive conversions. But sending the same message to everyone on your list can be counterproductive and even annoying. That's why you need to segment and personalize your emails based on customer behavior.?
You'll learn how to do that in four simple steps.
By segmenting and personalizing your emails, you can send different messages to different groups of subscribers based on their interests, preferences, actions, or other criteria. This allows you to craft content, offers, and calls to action that are tailored to their needs and expectations. Doing so can have a range of positive effects, such as boosting open, click, and conversion rates, building trust and loyalty with your subscribers, reducing unsubscribe and spam rates, and improving your deliverability and reputation.
All your users are not equal. They are in different stages of the buyer journey with different needs and objections. Some people may not even be aware they're facing a problem; others may be looking for a solution but not urgently. By segmenting your email list, you can send emails that address their objections and are, thus, personalized. Such that, when they finally decide to buy, you're at the top of their minds, and they choose you over all the other solutions.
If you're trying to build an audience, you want to meet them where they are at and speak to them in their language; as best as possible. Personalizing your messages will increase the amount of engagement and set you up for success. When I worked on a client roster of over 100+ clients at Meta, I would often segment my educational messaging and ensure I was creating bespoke emails to different partner groups so that the messages were best received.
Even if you’re not sure where to segment further, starting with the most basic separation of prospects, opportunities, and current customers will significantly improve engagement rates. Other key segmenting opportunities: product or service interest, specific challenges, and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Creating custom audience segments is dividing consumers into groups with specific attributes. Companies can segment clients according to various factors, such as age, interests, gender, marital status, or industry. It helps to deliver the right message to the right audience and improves the brand experience.
3 reasons why personalizing emails is great business. 1?? Companies that personalize effectively grow faster. Companies that provide valuable, personalized experiences have 40% more revenue growth vs. companies that don't. 2?? Consumers buy more from "personalized" brands >76% of consumers are more likely to consider purchasing from personalized brands >78% of consumers are more likely to make repeat purchases from personalized brands >78% of consumers are more likely to recommend to friends and family from personalized brands 3?? Consumers expect brands to be personalized 72% of consumers expect brands to recognized them as individuals and know their interests.
Gathering and analyzing data about your subscribers is the first step to personalizing your emails. You can use a variety of sources and methods to do this, such as signup forms to collect basic information, surveys to learn more about their preferences, tracking their behavior with your website, emails, or products, and segmentation tools like Mailchimp, HubSpot, or ActiveCampaign. With enough data, you can create segments based on demographics, psychographics, behavior, and stage. Examples of demographics include age, gender, location, income, and education, while psychographics include interests, hobbies, values, and personality. Behavior and stage segments can be based on engagement, activity, purchase, loyalty, awareness, consideration, decision, and retention.
There are tons of attributes I use to segment our users: demographics, psychographics, geographics. But I find activity and intent to be the most reliable factors. I like to ask these questions: 1. What has the user done? 2. What haven’t they done? 3. What should they do next? This lets you figure their awareness level + the message. Ex - Added to cart but didn’t purchase? Your email should nudge them to do that.
Once you’ve decided on the major segments of your audience, create a series of rules that will define who belongs to each one. You’ll save time (and headaches) by automating this segmentation. In tools like HubSpot, you can use hidden fields on forms, workflows triggered by content they’ve interacted with or their latest conversion source, and numerous other characteristics. Assign these users to active lists to easily target your audience segments.
Some ways I started: Email list segmentation ideas for marketers -Choose the right email tool for segmentation -Feed the right contacts into your email list -Keep it as simple as possible -Label new contacts early on -Remember user preferences -Keep your data in sync -Pair email list segmentation with automation
The second step to effectively segment and personalize your emails is to craft relevant and engaging content for each segment. To do this, you can employ a variety of techniques and elements, such as personalization tokens, dynamic content, catchy and specific subject lines, clear and concise body copy, high-quality and relevant images, incentives, discounts, or freebies that match the subscriber's needs and interests, and clear and compelling calls to action that prompt the subscriber to take the next step. All of these elements can help you create an email that resonates with your subscribers and encourages them to take action.
In my experience, you can even utilize different brand "voices" to your personas or avatars that make up your segmented audience. While some prefer data, facts, numbers, and content in an authoritative voice, other audiences might prefer a personal touch or outreach email that seems direct, personal, or uses emojis, for example. Don't be afraid to A/B test the cadence and tone of your emails. There is a person on the other end.
The third step to segment and personalize your emails is to test and optimize your email campaigns. To do this, you can use a variety of methods and metrics, such as A/B testing to compare different versions of your emails, analytics to measure open rate, click rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, or unsubscribe rate, surveys, polls, or reviews to collect feedback from your subscribers, and optimization to improve your email campaigns. By using these tools, you can gain insight into how your emails are performing across different segments and criteria, and make changes to your content, offers, or calls to action, or create new segments or criteria.
A critical component of A/B testing is only testing one key element at a time — otherwise, you won’t know which one truly gave you the difference in results. Choose which elements to test based on your desired outcome. If you want to increase your open rate, try testing subject lines or preview text. To increase clickthrough rate, try testing your call to action or the amount of text in the body of your email. Different testing opportunities will come from different elements in your email — and if you direct them to a landing page, don’t forget to test there too!
It’s important to understand the other components of a true test. Things like template, font, timing, color scheme and content (using GA as a guiding force on what resonates most with your audience.) Testing the subject line is just the beginning.
At the very least, quality assurance testing for emails will help you avoid the worst outcomes before they have a chance to happen. Here’s a list of email tests you can perform before executing marketing campaigns. Link validating: Test every single link included in your email. Without URLs pointing to the correct locations, your marketing campaign won’t be effective or lead to conversions. Broken and incorrect links won’t affect your brand’s reputation and can result in a bad experience for your subscribers.
The fourth and final step to segment and personalize your emails is to repeat the process regularly and consistently. This is not a one-time task, but an ongoing strategy that requires constant monitoring and updating. To ensure success, you should continually collect and analyze data about your subscribers and their behavior, create and test different content and offers for different segments and stages, measure and optimize your email campaigns and their performance, and segment and personalize your emails in email marketing. This process should be repeated regularly to ensure that your emails are always up-to-date and effective.
Segmentation has to be data-driven. Ideally you should be leveraging customer intent and behavior to personalize each and every message you send to them. At a minimum you should be segmenting based on purchase/browse behavior and geography. Every interaction customers have with your website is an intent signal that shows their conviction or lack thereof in making a purchase. Your segmentation and personalization has to reinforce positives and help alleviate negatives when it comes to building that conviction. Segmentation can help narrow down the scope of the message to speak narrowly to a defined subset of customers - it's then your job to measure the efficacy of each message to each segment. Reach out if you have any questions!