Segmentation Strategies for 'Data Poor' Email Marketers

How do you gather the right information about people?

Ideally, you work with your customers and you’ve spoken to them, know what their interests or challenges are and why they think you can help them.

But sometimes, you may have a purely online relationship with them:

• they’ve signed up via your website
• they've clicked through a digital ad campaign
• they’ve signed up for gated content on your website (an eBook, whitepaper, webinar)
• or they've downloaded something

And this is all you know about them.

Data Rich, Insight Poor?

One marketing tactic when you don’t know enough about contacts is dynamic segmentation, which tracks the digital journey of the ‘customer’ across your digital platforms. The dynamic segmentation begins when someone signs up to a list on your website or shares their contact data with you online. This could happen on any page on your website, (ideally on a specific landing page you’ve created), but depending on where they sign up, you will have an idea of what attracted them to you. You then monitor how they respond to future email campaigns, where they click on the emails you send, when they visit your website and what they do.

You are essentially segmenting them based on their ‘behaviour’ in response to your digital marketing activities.

 This is a more sophisticated approach, and allows you to build follow-on campaigns that are ready for people who “voted with their mouse” – you know they’re interested in something specific and you have extra information prepared for them.

You need to look at a contact’s behaviour, how, where and when they’ve expressed a preference and this informs your segmentation of them.

 Analytics & Split Testing

It is important to monitor how each campaign performs and the analytics in most email marketing software will not only give you a detailed report, it will learn and make recommendations as you progress.

Metrics can show you what you got right and what you got wrong. If you haven’t done any split testing (of different subject lines, graphics, photography, sender name, times of day or days of week) you may not know the optimum time to send or the best subject line for your email campaign.

You need to track the unique opens of emails, the clicks (what interested them) and the conversions. In email and content marketing, conversions aren’t necessarily someone making a purchase, but rather that they followed your ‘call to action’ and took the next step, regardless of what that was.

In the next article, we'll look at the pros and cons of email personalisation.

Until next time,

Joanne Dolezal, ?Digital & Content Marketing Consultant

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