5 Email Marketing Segmentation Hacks to Improve Lead Conversions
In an age of digital marketing, it’s more important than ever to make sure that your promotional email content is properly targeted and structured so that you can stand out in a potential customer’s inbox.
More and more businesses are finding that mass email marketing campaigns fall short of their targets when it comes to attracting leads (not to mention that they fail to deliver that personalized experience that customers expect).
Worry not, though, as this is where email segmentation comes into play. Let’s find out more about how you can incorporate segmented campaigns into your broader email marketing strategy.
Email Segmentation: Definition and Benefits
Email segmentation refers to the practice of creating different email lists that divide customers along various lines to maximize lead conversion and click-through rates with relevant emails and personalized content. Email segmentation is well suited for this task because it can utilize a more holistic approach to marketing, focusing on what matters most to your various email subscribers.
Email segmentation is beneficial because, at its root, it recognizes that different customers have different needs and goals. Businesses that send all of their customers the same marketing material often miss out on lead conversions because their communications can seem irrelevant and blend in with all of the other promotional emails flowing into their customers’ inboxes.
When you start to segment customers, you can begin to research and build categories into which customers can be separated to increase the success rate of promotional content. These categories will tend to differ from business to business, and they should be constructed to reflect the demands of your market sector and key demographics.
Some of these categories can include current customers, engaged subscribers, one-time customers, or even inactive users.
Email segmentation is also excellent at lead prospecting. What is lead prospecting? Well, it’s the process of identifying customers that are likely to be interested in the service that your business is offering. If you have noticed that a particular demographic reacts well to your business, you might decide that it’s worth sending a series of emails to potential customers in that bracket to boost sales.
Different Types of Segmentation
There are many different types of segmentation that you can explore to improve lead conversion through your email lists, for example:
- Geographic Segmentation
- New Subscriber Segmentation
- Language Segmentation
- Customer Life-Cycle Segmentation
- Behavioral Segmentation (based on prior purchases and interaction history)
- Psychographic Segmentation (lifestyle, politics, personal values, etc.)
- Demographic Segmentation (age, income level, job title, gender, marital status, etc.)
Seeing as there are so many angles from which to approach email segmentation, it’s important to thoroughly research your customer base to find out what will work best for you. If the majority of your customers come from a particular age bracket, it wouldn’t make sense to approach email segmentation based primarily on age, as you’d end up sending the same promotional content to most of your customers.
There are also different segmentations depending on whether you are targeting the general public or other businesses. Businesses will have different priorities to regular customers, and by creating effective business segmentations and coupling them with B2B lead generation software, you can greatly improve lead conversion in this area.
5 Email Segmentation Hacks to Improve Lead Conversions
1. Customer Life-Cycle Segmentation
One tip for improving lead conversions is to implement a system of email segmentation based upon the customer life-cycle and purchase history. Segmentation that’s based on the customer life-cycle and purchase behavior is more likely to improve lead conversions because it ensures that your email promotions contain relevant content.
Customers are more likely to interact with a promotion that resonates with them – for example, a dormant customer is much more likely to be enticed by a discount code for returning customers than a new prospective customer who has never purchased with you before.
By approaching each customer with material that reflects their purchase history and position within the customer life-cycle, you should generate more lead conversions and boost customer loyalty; after all, customers appreciate businesses that appear to understand their needs and purchasing behavior.
Customer life-cycle segmentation can help to build a sense of understanding between your business and the customer, especially in the case of loyal customers, which email promotion campaigns can take advantage of.
2. Abandoned Cart Emails
Abandoned cart emails are linked to the customer life-cycle, as they are emails to customers who have shown a clear interest in your product but abandoned their cart before finalizing a purchase. Sending an excellent offer to a customer who has almost purchased with you before can bear great lead conversion results and drastically improve the success of your promotional material.
By converting leads amongst this target audience, your business stands to gain long-term customers by demonstrating that you understand their needs and value their business. This can lead to further purchases and a higher engagement level in the future, so it’s crucial to try and convert these leads.
Nonetheless, make sure that you are using several different templates and personalizations for different email segmentations when sending an abandoned cart email, otherwise you won’t be able to fully capitalize on the opportunity to convert these leads. AI customer support can often help secure these leads, as it can provide chat boxes at checkout to ensure that you’re properly servicing these customer’s needs.
3. Language and Location Segmentation
Email segmentation that takes language and location into account carries several significant benefits. Firstly, language segmentation is essential for international sales – for instance, it’s not much use to send English emails to audiences in China. By segmenting emails along language lines, you ensure that your communication remains clear and effective across the globe.
The second important aspect of location segmentation revolves around driving sales towards local stores. These emails can take advantage of localized exclusive discounts, driving foot traffic toward these stores and increasing sales in the process. Promotions that take advantage of these localized offers can improve lead conversion drastically, as there is a good chance that customers visiting a store to make use of an offer on one selected product will end up buying other products, too.
Location segmentation can also help prioritize promotions based on geographic relevance, which bears results for online stores. Sending a promotional offer for thick winter coats to customers based in Los Angeles, for instance, is less likely to pay dividends when compared to the same offer sent to a customer living in a cold climate.
However, this can be taken further. By paying attention to sales data in different regions, businesses can prioritize locally trending products to boost lead conversion and sales by zip code.
4. Tailoring Emails to Different Devices
Email segmentation that divides customers along device lines is great for ensuring that your copy delivers the maximum impact. By segmenting customers along device lines, businesses are able to create intricate email designs that make the best use of space on any given screen, which is excellent for creating a professional and impressive campaign.
Customers who are impressed by a sleek design are more likely to be driven toward your site and converted into sales because your company will seem professional, trustworthy, and well-run.
5. Testing and Tracking Results
The final tip is one that brings everything together. Testing and tracking are absolutely essential for email segmentation, as they are the primary way that a business can measure and improve its email campaigns. Testing and tracking will reinforce all the previous tips presented in this guide, as it is a method that refines and sharpens your campaigns to ensure effectiveness.
Without testing and tracking, each email sent is a shot in the dark – even in the case of segmented emails, which have already been curated to some degree. Testing is crucial for all stages of a segmented email campaign – whether you’re setting the scope of each segment, choosing which products to promote, or even refining your email copy, tracking and testing will always prove an asset.
Leverage A/B experiments to compare the lead conversion of two different promotions and find out which works best. Your implementation of email segmentation should evolve with your business over time, and once it has been set up, you will need to maintain it to retain relevance and effectiveness.
Final Thoughts
Email segmentation is a useful tool for any business, especially considering the sheer volume of promotional content that enters a given inbox on any day. Today, it’s more important than ever to boost your email marketing platform so that promotional content stands out as both relevant and enticing, and email segmentation represents a great way of achieving these goals.
Once you have a sophisticated campaign that caters to different devices, age demographics, values, geographic locations, localized demands, and customers at different stages of interaction with the business, you can be confident that you’re doing all you can to improve conversion rates and email engagement.
More than anything, you’ll be reassured that your business has the tools to remain relevant in the eyes of its customers, and constantly adapt to reflect the needs of the various demographics that you interact with daily.