10 Email Segmentation Strategies For Beginners To Try Now

Segmentation is a powerful email marketing strategy to personalize your emails and customize your email copy for more precise and effective targeting.

If you are new to email marketing for your small business, segmentation might seem a bit more advance, but it becomes easier once you understand the fundamentals.

Well, here are the best email segmentation tips that you need to get started with to strengthen your foundation in segmentation.

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Get Yourself Right Email Segmentation Software & Tools

To even begin with email segmentation, you need to first choose an email service provider that allows email segmentation.

You also will require robust tools with high-end features to create targeted email opt-in forms and segmented lists.

Some very well-known email segmentation software is Drip, ConvertKit, SendinBlue, Constant Contact, HubSpot, GetResponse, and many more.

Choosing the right email marketing platform and tools is essential to your email segmentation, especially when you’re new to it.

Focus on Segmenting Out Your New Subscribers

One of the best email segmentation strategies is creating a segment for your new subscribers.

You need to focus more on them than just asking for their email address; add them to your subscription list; you can’t just leave them in the cold.

It becomes crucial to pave their way, firstly through a warm welcome by sending them a welcome email.

This email segment needs a different marketing approach and content since the prospect knows nothing about your brand.

So your attempt with this segmented list will be to help them get started with your content. Also, establish consistent communication leading up to a well-established relationship.

Segmenting List To Send Welcome Emails

New subscribers are very delicate potential leads. You are supposed to lead them, nurture them right from the beginning, convert them into regular users, and eventually into a customer.

This only happens if you make the right impression on them when they’ve just signed up.

Welcome emails or series of welcome emails are your only chance to make your first impression great and hook them with your content right away.

To create a segmented list exclusively for newly signed-up subscribers to send them welcome emails or, better, a series of welcome emails.

These emails will be focusing on :

Thanking them for joining your email list
Setting up expectations
Integrating content on your website to help them get started
Making promises about what value they can gain from this subscription

Don’t try to rush in and tell everything in your first email, as feel free to send multiple welcome emails.

Those emails won’t be about your product or selling them anything. It will be completely about making them engage with what you have to offer.

Send the best of your blog articles or tell them how to use your application. Help them take the first step and make them feel at home.

Segment Your List On The Basis Of User’s Frequency Preferences

The more you do according to your users, the better results you will be able to see in your marketing campaign.

With email segmentation, you can make it even better.

All you have to do is ask your audience or subscribers through surveys, forms, or simply text emails, what frequency of emails they would prefer.

Now, usually with this information, marketers get their percentage or an average which they opt to leave all others hanging dry.

With segmentation, you can actually create multiple segmented lists based on the frequency of emails they prefer.

And then, using automation and custom email campaigns, you can send them emails, every one of them, only as much as they want and when they want.

Isn’t this amazing? When you combine the power of segmentation and automation, the lengths of preference-based optimizing you can do are unbelievable.

Segmenting Your Email List Based On The Content They Prefer

Earlier, as you’ve seen how preference for their frequency is used to segment the list, the same you can do with their content preference as well.

This is, in fact, even more powerful and helps you increase engagement with your subscribers a hundredfold.

You can ask your audience or subscribers what kind of content they prefer.

Would they prefer to get content on a particular category or multiple categories? Allow them to choose as they want.

They also can opt on whether they look forward to industry updates, product updates, new offers, discounts, or not.

Make sure you send these feedback emails periodically, as the chances are that their preferences will change over time.

Even the ones who do not ask for your product initially, with this initiative after a time, will feel more comfortable and confident to opt for product offers, etc.

This is also your road to hyper-personalizing the email marketing campaign so much so that each and every user will feel heard and valued.

Such segmentation techniques will help you skyrocket your email engagement and build a great reputation for your brand.

Use The Audience’s Interests To Segment Your List

List segmentation becomes more powerful when it is customized using your performance reports and analysis of your email marketing campaign.

Integrating the data into your marketing strategy assure success, and especially in the case of segmentation, it lets you focus on where things either need work or have potential.

Analyze the interest of your subscribers, and see which content they love or seek.

That will again work differently for different subscribers allowing you to segment them out and together to create more targeted emails.

Using this, you can send very specific types of content to a very particular segmented list.

For example, there will be certain subscribers from your list who will be getting a particular blog content recommendation, whereas some will be getting others, as per their preference.

In this way, you will be able to generate more open rates, higher click-throughs, and, naturally, more engagement.

Sending Custom Location-Based Invites

You might be holding up an event in a particular city and you have an email list of 10,000 subscribers across the world.

Now, sending the invites to attend the meeting to a subscriber who is living miles away will be a waste of time and just inappropriate.

This also shows the subscribers that they are just a number or merely an email address in an automation campaign.

Not to mention, this portrays it in a good light, so it is better to send emails to those who are in that particular location or the city.

And in order to do so, you can always segment your contact list on the basis of country, city, or even particular region.

Segmenting Your Email List On The Basis Of Open Rates

You need to use the information you collect from the campaign performance metrics, particularly sorting it out through open rate.

This information regarding the open rates of your campaign tells you a lot about how curious your subscribers are about your emails.

Are they opening a specific type of email a lot? Or are particular kinds of subscribers interested in specific email categories?

Who are the subscribers who are not opening your email at all? And there are tons of observations you can understand by looking at the open rate metrics.

Now you can use this data as leverage to segment your email list accordingly to drive certain objectives.

For example, you can see which subscribers are engaging too much less and which are engaging most often.

Creating these two segments, you can craft customized email targeting both of these separately as follows:

For highly engaging subscribers, send them a reward for engaging with you so often. It can be a special discount, free coupon code, pdf, some limited access to your tool or program, etc.
For those who are not engaging with your emails at all, you send them emails with catchy and attention-grabbing subject lines with heavy discounts or offers in them to convert them into customers or engaging subscribers.

Targeting the Inactive Segment Of Your Email List

One of the challenging aspects of email marketing is dealing with inactive subscribers, which you get a lot of them.

There are always subscribers who remain silent and inactive for a while, but you can’t just leave them to be.

A lot of inactive subscribers in your email list hamper the performance of your email campaign and the quality of your contact list.

You need to retarget this segment of your contact list, and to do that, first, you need to do email segmentation to identify and filter out these subscribers.

The best way to do so is to check the performance metrics of your last few campaigns or just the last one.

You can look at the open rates and engagement rates of your email campaigns and see which subscribers have not even opened your emails for a long time.

Craft a specialized message for this segment focusing on how you can get them back and make them engage with your emails.

You can mention how you are missing them or what they are leaving at the table by noting engaging with your content.

Furthermore, you can attract them with some fat discount, free coupons, free but limited access to your program, software, or tool, or give them freebies and downloadables.

The goal here is to make your inactive subscribers active again.

Sending Specific Lead Magnets To Subscribers That They Selected For

Depending upon which lead magnet your subscriber has opted for, from your website, you can segment the contact list accordingly.

Email marketing platforms or tools allow you to create an email list specifically for your particular lead magnets.

This means you would know the specific interests and preferences of a particular category of people, and hence you can send a more targeted email to them.

So all you have to do when you craft your message, you select the list depending upon the various lead magnets through which subscribers have subscribed and send that email to only those subscribers.

For example, there is a lead magnet on your product category page for hair grooming products you have, among others.

Maybe it is a downloadable pdf with the title ‘how to style your hair without spending a fortune in the salon, 65 styles to try”.

Now the subscribers you got by downloading this lead magnet and sharing their email addresses are clearly interested in hair styling and grooming.

So, you can craft a personalized and more targeted email regarding hairstyling and grooming, offering your hair styling products with a good discount or maybe a subscription box with more guides.

And send this email not to all of your subscribers but only to the segment with subscribers who opt in via downloading your hair styling lead magnet.