When you walk into your local coffee shop, say hi to your favourite barista, and see that they’ve already started your usual latte, it feels good. It’s nice to be recognized and remembered.
These days digital marketert know the value of segmenting email marketing lists. Why? Because much like the example above, segmenting allows you to personalise your marketing to help improve your ROI and boost your conversion rates.
Why Segment Your Email Marketing Lists?
In 2015, office workers received an average of 121 emails a day, and today it’s over 200. Mind boggling — and time-consuming, which could explain why many of these daily emails remain unopened.
To get your organisation’s emails noticed — and opened — you’ll need to pull out all the stops to minimise opt-outs and increase your conversion rate.
Your first steps should include personalising your email marketing and segmenting your email marketing lists. The Data and Marketing Association found that “segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue” for companies engaged in email marketing.Email List Segmentation
Segmenting your email marketing lists involves sorting your subscribers into pre-defined buckets — buckets that divide them into categories based on such things as who and what they are, such as:
- Demographics
- Job function
- Industry
- Organisation type
- Industry
- Interests
- Geographic location, and
- Whatever else matters to you
The idea behind email segmentation is that you can then send more relevant emails to each group with the goal of getting a higher percentage of people to open them because the recipients will perceive the message as relevant to them.
However, regardless of how you categorise your email list, one of the buckets you use should be for the “non-engaged” on your list. The purpose of this bucket is to remind you to figure out a way to re-engage with them or determine when it’s time to wipe them from your email list entirely.
Why Personalisation in Email Marketing Matters
Personalisation is just what it sounds like. It’s you playing the role of the barista, remembering your customer and what they like, and getting something ready for them ahead of time. So, go ahead and use their first name in your email greeting.
But personalisation goes beyond simply inserting <firstname>. It’s based on past and current behaviour so you can anticipate needs, find solutions to problems he’s likely to encounter based on those behaviours, and more.
So, engage in email list personalisation to accomplish this. Consider appending information to each subscriber’s name that includes:
- When they signed up for your list
- Date of first purchase
- Items purchased
- Buyer personas
- Level of engagement
- PDFs or other collateral that’s been downloaded
- Blogs that have been read
- Personal meetings
- Emails that have been responded to
- Marketing channel preferences (email, social media, etc.)
- Birth day and month
Finally, in any email marketing strategy personalised experiences are no longer a nice-to-have, meaning it’s necessary for your email marketing campaigns to succeed.
Remember, it’s fine for a subscriber to be in more than one bucket and over time a subscriber might need to be moved from one bucket to another.
How to Personalise Your Email Marketing
It’s probably become clear that you must take a few steps to successfully personalise your email marketing by segmentation of your list.
- Figure out your strategy
- Get your data in order
- Parse the list as described above
If you’ve gotten this far, you know your plan to implement personalisation, now you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to do it. And that will depend on your firm, the staff available for marketing, the software you have or plan to buy, and how much data you really want to collect and use.
- Will you have hundreds of email templates to correspond to each behaviour or event that might occur in categories of subscribers?
- How many products do you have?
- How many current customers?
- Do you need new software to help create this ever-increasing database?
- Will your email provider be able to handle automatically sending a particular email based on an event?
Once you’ve determined those answers, you need to get your data in order.
- What information will you collect?
- What’s your minimum requirement of information?
- How many forms will you need?
- Will the forms be different for someone subscribing to your list than for someone downloading a white paper?
- Will it need to be different for readers of your blog?
- How will all the data get into the database?
- How will sales and meetings be entered into the database?
The Benefits of Personalisation in Your Email Marketing
Perhaps it’s enough to know that for each dollar you spend on email marketing you could see a huge increase in revenue. Or, if you need more convincing, consider that:
- According to Optimonster your segmented list will enjoy a 14.3% higher open rate than non-segmented emails
- Emails are far more effective in gaining new customers than is social media
- According to consumer reports, 81% of online purchasers say they’d consider another purchase based on a targeted, personalised email they receive related to “something you might like” after an online experience
- You’ll increase brand affinity
LD can help you construct your submission forms, collect data, and help you personalise your emails so you can watch your ROI and conversion rates rise. Book your free coffee chat to learn how.