With new marketing techniques and strategies getting into the market, many argue about the effectiveness of email marketing in 2023 and beyond. However, the answer to this noise is that email marketing is still one of the most effective strategies, regardless of business size in order to boost a business’s conversion rates.
Statistics show that around 347.3 billion emails are sent and received daily in 2023, which offers an increment of 4.3% from last year’s daily average. The same margin is expected in 2024, with an average of 361.6 billion sent and received daily. Statistics also show that 89% of marketers rely on email marketing as the primary lead-generation channel.
With these statistics on board, there is no doubt about the effectiveness of email marketing.
However, there can be a debate on maximizing the potential of email channels for personalized campaigns and customer engagement. It implies the need to personalize mailing lists to craft targeted marketing automation journeys to bear the results of improved conversion rates and higher return on investment for your email marketing.
In today’s article, we will walk you through practical techniques regarding personalized mailing list management for improved conversion rates. So let’s get into it.
Introduction: The Power of Personalization
First, it’s essential to understand the personalization and potential of the strategy for your overall marketing efforts. When it comes to personalization in email marketing, it means the categorization of email marketing lists into specific groups or segments depending on different factors like demographics, interests, or typical behaviour.
When you use personalization in email marketing lists, automation is easier to integrate with your marketing. It also ensures that relevant content is sent to every person on the list and hence, helps in enhancing overall engagement and conversion rates.
The power of personalization in email marketing lists can be understood by the example of an online clothing retailer who has segmented the mailing lists according to the following factors: age, gender, and purchase history. The people on his mailing list receive emails with personalized offers and recommendations based on segmentation factors.
Similarly, a fitness studio might distinguish the mailing lists depending on factors like preferred workout types, individual fitness goals, and membership status of every member.
These examples signify that you can leverage personalization’s power by segmenting mailing lists. The segmentation practices allow you to send tailored emails resonating with every recipient. It creates a personalized experience and increases email open rates and conversions(desired actions intended from emails).
A report by Yes Lifecycle Marketing, the open rate of personalized messages is 50% higher than non-personalized messages. The click-through rate of such emails is also 41% higher than non-personalized ones. The statistics show the power of personalization for your email campaigns. It’s time to move on to the necessary actions to deliver a personalized experience: segmentation of email marketing lists.
Therefore, the next section of the article will delve into the significance of segmenting your email marketing list and its potential benefits for your business.
The Importance of List Personalization
All marketers agree that the effectiveness of automated marketing campaigns can only be increased with proper segmentation of email marketing lists. The practice of segmentation not only helps to send highly personalized messages tailored to individual subscribers but also results in higher participation of the audience and better conversion rates. Therefore, every business and marketer should acknowledge the importance of segmentation and list personalization to avoid robotic emails to the entire email list.
Email marketing campaigns should create resonating experiences and captivating content according to individual subscribers’ preferences. And it can only be achieved by segregating your email lists into smaller groups with similarities, be it demographic data, interests, or characteristics, and sending relevant messages to each group.
At this point, most marketers will be wondering how to achieve segmentation and email list personalization. So here is how you can do it.
The email list segmentation can be done using different variables and criteria. It can be sign-up information telling you about the profession, location, age, gender, or job title of the subscriber. When the essential information is combined with complex metrics like past opens or clicks of the user, unique data points can be gathered. The business can leverage these data points for segmentation and personalized messages addressing every subscriber’s needs.
Email list personalization offers benefits like better engagement and conversion rates for businesses regardless of the industry or size. Therefore, it’s high time to employ list personalization and segmentation in your email marketing campaigns and improve your ROI.
Maximizing the Potential of Email List Customization
We have already showcased how email list segmentation can be achieved using different data points from the information gathered during the lead-generation process. However, here is a complete list of strategies to help you customize your email lists for the maximum potential of email marketing campaigns.
Conversion Rates Strategy 1 – Utilize Sign-up Information:
The information provided by the user at the sign-up for your email list is the beginning point and undoubtedly most important. Without this information, personalization efforts will be equivalent to throwing an arrow in the dark. Therefore, ask for all relevant information in the sign-up form to help you personalize your email list.
And when it comes to segmentation of email lists, utilize the sign-up information, be it demographic, geographic, professional, or interests data. This is the beginning point for creating targeted campaigns based on your audience’s data.
Conversion Rates Strategy 2 – Analyze Email Engagement Data:
Email engagement data also helps in segmentation. It can be treated as advanced data about a subscriber’s behaviour. Email engagement data encompasses subscribers’ behaviour related to email opens, click-throughs, etc. You can add segmentation criteria for subscribers who open your emails frequently, those who click through the links shared, and those who do not open your emails. Either combined with the primary data of users or employed independently, email engagement segmentation helps create highly targeted messaging for subscribers.
Conversion Rates Strategy 3 – Leverage Purchase History:
Another email list segmentation approach is translating subscribers’ purchase history into email lists. This approach is usually beneficial for eCommerce businesses as they can send emails with personalized offers and recommendations based on previous purchase history. Regardless of a business owner’s approach, email list segmentation must continue. Therefore, we recommend marketers and business owners continuously collect data about their audience by using surveys, soliciting feedback, personal interactions, etc. These tools will help you to refine your segmentation further and get even higher conversion rates from email marketing campaigns.
Exemplary Segmentation Strategies:
We have already walked you through different approaches and techniques for email list segmentation. Here are examples of the data points in every segmentation technique you might apply in your email marketing:
1. Demographic Segmentation to Boost Conversion Rates:
Demographic segmentation will consider primary data of the audience’s location, age, gender, marital status, employment, education, ethnicity, etc. For instance, an in-store sale promotion at a specific location will only send an alert email to subscribers.
2. Purchase History:
When segmenting based on user purchase history or past experiences with your brand, it includes employing data like past purchases, abandoned carts, navigated products, etc. This approach allows you to curate targeted campaigns for repeat purchases.
3. Email Engagement:
You can also personalize the email lists based on the previous email engagement history of the subscribers. For instance, you can target subscribers with better open-rate and click-through rates differently from those having low email engagement.
4. Interest-Based:
The key to personalizing your emails and email lists is segregating subscribers based on their interests, conversion rates, and preferences and curating targeted messages accordingly.
5. New Subscribers:
When you get new subscribers on board, welcome emails can do wonders for your email campaigns. Therefore, personalize email lists for new subscribers to generate a positive impression and higher engagement.
6. Re-engage Inactive Subscribers to Boost Conversion Rates:
Like how you would curate personalized messages for subscribers with higher engagement rates, you must also target inactive subscribers. Whether you have subscribers with low open rates or click-throughs, retarget and re-engage them to avoid subscribers signing off.
Sending Personalized Messages to Different Segments
We have discussed segmenting email marketing lists and curating targeted marketing campaigns afterwards. However, it’s just the starting point, and the next step of creating customized messages for every segment is even more crucial.
Therefore, focus on diverse and personalized subject lines and discover different ways to personalize the experience for the subscribers. It implies testing other subject lines to analyze the results and find the best combination for your target audience. As a result, you can get better conversion rates and return on investments.
Besides the subject lines, the call to action (CTAs) are the email’s soul. If the CTA section of an email is not persuasive, the objective of email marketing will be killed. Therefore, you should try visual cues and well-defined CTA buttons to get the desired actions from emails. Consequently, your marketing campaigns also perform well with higher click-throughs and ROI.
Finally, KPIs analysis is also essential to further refine your campaigns and resonate well with the customers. For instance, the metrics like open rates and click-through rates are significant indicators that depict whether the email’s subject line, message, and CTA resonate strongly with every segment of your audience. The insights from KPI performance allow you to improve your future campaigns and retarget the segments for higher conversions and maximum ROI.
We have set the stage for you to start working on email list segmentation and get started to connect with your audience. And if you’re looking to maximize the impact of your email marketing campaigns by working with experts, reach out to Elite Digital and we’ll work with you to deliver actual results.
