Leads aren’t leads. They’re people.
That means each of your leads is unique. And they want different things. With data from their activity history, it won’t take you long to understand more of what they want and what their motivations are. By segmenting your email marketing lists, you can send the most relevant content to the right individuals at the right time.
Segmenting is a proven commodity for obtaining more open and click-through rates. In fact, according to MailChimp, click-through rates are 100.95%, higher and open rates are 14.31% higher than those of non-segmented campaigns. There are a variety of ways you can segment your email lists, and often segments can be combined to help generate the most effective campaigns.
6 Ways to Segment Your Email Marketing Lists to Increase Sales
-
- Demographics
In determining your leads’ interests and needs, you can first start by segmenting them by demographics such as age, gender, industry, location, or some combination. Knowing which metrics are important to your company is essential before asking for information from your leads during the signup process.
-
- Geographic Location
By knowing where your leads live you can better target them. For example, you can send out time-based messages that hit leads in different time zones at a specific time; promote events in specific store locations; or even personalize directions to a store, based on the lead’s geolocation.
-
- Survey or Quiz Results
If you’re apprehensive about asking leads to give out too much information when signing up for your mailing list, you can collect demographic data by sending out a survey or quiz. In addition, you can get an idea about their preferences and tastes. But if you do this, it’s smart to offer some sort of motivation for them to participate, such as a drawing for a prize.
-
- Email Engagement
By using open and click-through rates, you can collect data in a number of ways. You can segment by engagement, separating your leads into active and inactive groups. You can then target the inactive group (for example, individuals who have not opened an email in two months) with a re-engagement campaign. With the engaged group, you can then target them in a specific way through an offer and then further target those who click on the offer link by categorizing them as interested in the offer.
-
- Past Purchases
Having tracked the source of your customers and their past purchases, you can create an email campaign that features similar or complementary offers to what they purchased previously. Or if the product they purchased needs to be replaced or refilled, for example, you can send an engaging email notifying them that it could be time to purchase a replacement. So you can segment by product purchased, category of the product purchased, or even several associated factors.
-
- Predictive Behavior
Another way of using list segmentation to increase sales is by creating predictive pathways to buying. Establish what actions most of your customers perform before buying. That way you can quickly identify which potential is more likely to convert. For businesses with a long sales cycle, this can save salespeople a lot of time and energy on people who aren’t likely to buy.