Having a massive inbox following is naturally the goal of every brand that commits to an email marketing strategy. Obvious statements aside, failing to get the most out of this audience via proper list segmentation can undo all of the hard work that you put into this process. If that doesn’t exactly sound like a path your brand wants to travel down, then take some time to look over these five simple tips for better list segmentation.
Mine Social Media for Customer Data
The first tip up on the list focuses on the powerful bond between social media and email marketing. Specifically, David Kirkpatrick of Marketing Sherpa points out that tethering social engagement to your contact list gives your brand access to a wide array insightful data points.Gender, customer interests, brand preferences, and even media consumption habits all fall under this process. From here, your organization can tailor content that fits into each of these interests or attributes and truly generate a more meaningful experience for its inbox following.
Develop Audience Personas
As you pull raw data from social media and other channels, it’s important to collate this information into wider personas and profiles. Otherwise, you’ll find that your brand’s segmentation efforts seem unfocused and lacking direction – two attributes that have no business being in the same discussion as your inbox outreach operations.Once you have these ideal personas in place, it’s a good idea to place an emphasis on the constant maintenance and upkeep of these audience silos. The more accurate and updated information you can funnel into these segment descriptions, the more likely your brand will be able to truly create content that resonates with these viewers.
Segment Based on Geography
While there are many different data points by which you can segment your contact list, there’s a strong case to be made for leveraging the power of location-based metrics as the primary piece of this puzzle. In fact, the HubSpot Blog’s Corey Wainwright suggests that this is one of the most influential bits of information to incorporate in the segmentation process.It doesn’t seem like much initially, but once you realize that geographic indicators help prevent your brand from sending in-store offers to contact list members that live two provinces away and other awkward scenarios, it’s fairly easy to see just how essential it is to embrace this kind of segmentation tactic.
Consider the Consumer Purchase Cycle
Wainwright also points out that keeping the consumer purchase cycle in mind as you segment your list can also open up new avenues of content optimization; especially if your target audience goes through multiple steps or phases before committing to a purchase. The big key here is that having access to prior purchase history, abandoned cart records, and other indicators gives your brand a chance to capture conversions that generic or “one size fits all” content would otherwise let fall through the cracks.
Leverage One-to-One Tactics
The final segmentation tip on our list comes from Marketing Land’s Chris Hexton and focuses on the concept of one-to-one segmentation. If you’re not familiar with this method, it’s all about leveraging unique audience identifiers to develop and deploy email marketing content that speaks directly to the person on the other side of the screen.While some readers out there might assume that slapping a “Hello Mr. or Mrs. [insert name here]” at the top of a marketed message falls under the one-to-one segmentation approach, the truth of the matter is that this tactic goes so much deeper than this basic personalization strategy. Essentially, you’ll need to have access to attributes that are inherently unique to your target viewer to pull off this method of list segmentation.In the example illustrated by Hexton, an online pet supplies retailer created a custom web portal to gather information about the dogs of participating contact list members. From here this info was utilized to build hyper-personalized campaign content based on the breed, size, age, and other characteristics of each pet. It’s far from an easy or simple tactic to undertake, but there’s no denying that generating such personal and unique content truly shows how much a brand cares for its loyal inbox following.At the end of the day, implementing proper list segmentation requires a hefty amount of hard work and effort on your end of the equation; there’s no reason to skirt around this fact. However, with what you’ve learned here guiding the way, tapping into the power of proper segmentation doesn’t have to be some unobtainable or Herculean task anymore.
