Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the hardest to see. But when it comes to better email marketing, the best approach isn’t complex; it’s just time to get a little more personal.
From podcasts and gaming apps to streaming video and on-demand downloads, consumers don’t have much reason to sit through content that doesn’t hold their interest. Any time spent focusing on something uninteresting or irrelevant could be spent on a task that’s more productive or enjoyable.
That’s why email segmentation is so important. A consumer is much less likely to spend time reading a marketing email when she’s chatting with an old friend from across the country during a marathon Pinterest session.
And segmentation actually does work. Marketing research firm MarketingSherpa found that when the women’s retail site SwayChic optimized email campaigns by segmentation, the company increased open rates by 40 percent. HubSpot, too, improved its clickthrough rate by more than 583 percent by implementing email segmentation, jumping to a 16.4 percent clickthrough rate that blows the industry-standard 2.4 percent out of the water.
When companies spam consumers with too many irrelevant messages, they unsubscribe from all communications — even the ones that finally might have prompted them to whip out their credit cards.
In marketing, people often want to come up with big solutions to what they see as big problems. But email segmentation is such a simple and perhaps even obvious solution that marketers pass it over. It’s been around so long that people might be tempted to think it’s passé. Even the name seems more complex than it actually is — email segmentation is little more than a simple division of marketing messages to target different customer demographics.
In essence, segmentation means a company is personalizing the content it sends out to users based on what’s known about them. Typically it’s done by analyzing their shopping habits or professional background and sending them an email that’s tailored to their interests. Marketers simply need this user data, an email management system such as MailChimp and an app or other way of organizing the different segments, or groups.
Maybe its simplicity is actually why so many marketers overlook this simple strategy. They might not even know what email segmentation is, having themselves glazed over at the sight of yet another clunky term. But when marketers can figure out how to target their marketing emails to show customers things they’re actually likely to purchase or use, they’ll be operating much more efficiently than they were before. The big name isn’t as intimidating as it sounds.
