Today on the Demand Gen Pod, Episode 6, Ryan discusses the importance of email segmentation in marketing. Segmentation
allows for targeting specific audiences within a larger database, resulting in
increased engagement, open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
The process of building a campaign starts with determining the desired output
and working backwards to develop content and segmentation strategies.
Segmentation can be done based on demographics, behavior, or purchase history.
Personalized emails have higher open rates and better conversions. Best
practices include regularly updating and refining segments, leveraging
automation, conducting A/B tests for optimization, aligning with sales for
list maintenance, and ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations like
GDPR and CCPA.
Summary notes from Episode 6:
- Email segmentation is crucial in email marketing as it allows targeting specific audiences within a larger database.
- Segmenting email lists improves engagement, open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
- Start building a campaign by determining the desired output, then working back to content production and segmentation.
- Segmentation can be based on interests, behavioral interactions, purchase history, and demographics.
- Personalized emails have higher open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
- Segmenting lists helps build strong relationships with customers and leads, reducing the likelihood of unsubscribing.
- To improve engagement, deliver relevant and interesting content through targeted segmentation.
- Challenges include collecting and managing data accurately, maintaining segmentation strategy as the list grows, and avoiding over-segmentation.
- Regularly update and refine segments, leverage automation, and conduct A/B tests to optimize results.
- Align with sales to update list maintenance based on conversations and changes in contact information.
Full Transcript:
00:01
Hey, welcome to the demand gen pod. My name is Ryan. Today we are talking about email segmentation, segmenting our email lists. Let’s get going. So segmenting your email list is crucial in email marketing as it allows you to target specific audiences within a larger database that you may have access to. And so what I mean by this is that if you have a database and you sell perhaps multiple products, you might have everybody in that database who’s interested in all of those products. But individually they’re only interested in certain products. So you want to be able to email them and market to them separately from each other to only say for product A, send emails about product A, and then only send emails about product B to those who are interested in product B, so on and so forth. You kind of get the idea.
00:47
Now the benefits of segmenting your email list are tenfold, and they really revolve around increased engagement overall, increased open rates, higher click through rates, better conversion rates. All of these things will improve with solid segmentation. And usually I like to think that the segmentation that we devise comes last. So when we’re thinking about it comes last in terms of actually building it. But when we’re thinking about building a campaign, I always want to start at the bottom of that campaign, what’s the output supposed to be, and then how do we work our way back to the top of that content production and eventually get to the segmentation? So what’s the output supposed to be? Well, we want to promote a specific product with a sale. Okay, what should the content be? Well, the content should be obviously revolving around that sale, and we might have a couple of different bullets that we want to target and ways that we want to approach it.
01:42
So whether it’s a lifestyle product or a SaaS product or whatever. Okay, and then from that, what are the landing pages need to look like, right? What’s the rest of the content? What’s the CTA of the email, what’s the subject line going to be for the email? And now we’re kind of working our way back up through the experience and we’re getting to that segmentation. And so once we have a really solid understanding about what we’re sending and why we’re sending it, then we can get to the segmentation point, which is who are we sending it to? So now knowing what we’re sending, why we’re sending, what we’re trying to get out of sending it in the first place, what our goals are, what those KPIs are now, we can actually devise who would best to receive it, and that’s when we get to the segmentation.
02:24
So I always like to think that segmentation kind of comes last. You might think of really early on in the process, you might say, okay, well, I want to send an email to or a campaign I want to build a campaign for people who are interested in our first primary in our flagship product. Okay, but there might be segments within that product group of people who you want to target for a specific campaign and so that’s why you want to do that segmentation last. Now, segmentation can be done with lots of different ways and you can do it with demographics based on things like age, gender, location, interests. You can also target emails based on behavioral segmentation and so that would be grouping subscribers based on their interactions with your emails and website. And you can track what people are looking at, which pages people are looking at.
03:13
You can also track obviously which people emails people are opening and clicking through on and you can tag interests based on those interactions. So you can build automated programs that would say if somebody opens this email and then obviously clicks through that email, then we can infer I suppose that they’re interested in this product or we can infer they’re interested in this service and you can build further segmentation based on that engagement. That would behavioral segmentation. Now, you can also leverage things like purchase history segmentation and obviously that involves categorizing your subscribers based on their past purchases and their preferences and that’s really useful, right? So if we know what they’ve purchased in the past, we could do two things with that. We can obviously either suggest that they buy it again if it’s something that needs to be renewed, or we could offer some upsells opportunities upselling crosssell opportunities in order to either have them bump up in whatever tier they’re in or if you liked this product, then we think that you would like this product.
04:14
That would kind of be your cross sell segmenting. Your email list also enables personalized content creation and that’s really helpful. So you can resonate that with different audience segments and you can use segmentation not only in your kind of like top level segmentation of who gets into a campaign, but you can even leverage segmentation with dynamic content so even within that campaign you could make it even more specific to other groups. So kind of in my original example, you might have a flagship product that lots of people are interested in, and then you could put all of those people into a campaign and then leverage dynamic content to adjust that experience for each person as they go through it. Depending on any of those factors, like your basic demographic segmentation or behavioral segmentation or purchase history. So you could leverage those no matter how you wanted, whether it’s at the high level segmentation or you can narrow it down further within dynamic content in the content itself, which is super cool.
05:15
But regardless, personalized emails have higher open rates, they have better click through rates, they are much more likely to result in conversions. And all of these things are crucial to be thinking about as you’re building out your email programs. Not only that, but by delivering targeted content and segmenting your email list, it really helps build these stronger relationships with your customers and with your leads. And if you give them content that they like and they enjoy, then they’re willing to open those emails. They’re going to open them sooner, they’re more likely to engage, more likely to click through, and more likely to convert, which is really important and less likely to unsubscribe, also really important. But what about some ways to improve them? So segmenting your list can improve engagements as subscribers receive content that’s relevant and interesting to them and personalizing those emails, like we said, have higher email open rates and click through rates and better conversions.
06:09
And so by delivering that targeted content, segmenting your lists really helps build those strong relationships. And those steps will all help you to improve your conversion rates. So if you’re seeing poor conversion rates, consider leveraging some of those tips and work your way up step by step. Right? Start with one thing, change it. See if you notice an improvement as the campaign runs or depending on how many people you have going through it. If it’s pretty small, then you might want to change multiple things so that you kind of get a better hopefully a better kick. But on a high level, as long as you kind of follow those general rules, you’re not really going to go wrong, you’re not going to make it worse for yourself. So a couple of best practices, some challenges too, include actually collecting this data and managing it accurately.
06:56
And not only that, but maintaining the segmentation strategy as the list grows and you have more diverse groups coming in and then trying to avoid over segmentation. I think that the rule for over segmenting is definitely going to come down business to business. But the reality of it is that there’s a fine line somewhere inside of your lists where you are being too fine tuned. And that could very well come down to what is the return on investment for your campaigns that you’re building? Are you building 30 campaigns to target 100 people? Probably a bit overkill. Are you building 30 campaigns to target 300,000 people? Well, that might not be too much overkill depending on what the return on investment is for those people running into the campaign and how they’re converting. Some best practices really for that include regularly updating and refining those segments.
07:51
And also you can leverage automation to streamline that process and also conduct a B test to make sure that you’re optimizing your results. And I think that the really important thing here. With regularly updating and refining your segmentation, you can leverage sales to do that. So if you have leads who are going through the life sales lifecycle, make sure that sales knows that they should be updating some of these factors as they come up in conversation. So if they learn that they’re not at a specific company anymore. Company churn is real and it can be really high overall. And so you could have somebody who’s at a company and has a company email address and you’re working them and then they leave. Well, Sales might want to try to follow that person and that might only be through a phone number, right? You might have their actual cell phone, but you have their work email address.
08:38
So if we learn that their email address is updated, we need to rely on someone like Sales in order to be able to update that. So make sure that you’re aligning with Sales on the types of list maintenance that they can help you to provide. And what about compliance? So, businesses, we have to comply with data privacy regulations like GDPR, which is more European, and CCPA, which would be the California Protection Act, and especially depending on the size of your business and the revenue, depending on that, you have to conform to CCPA. Smaller businesses technically do not, but I would say it’s a pretty good practice to try to conform to them. And if you’re not familiar with them, it’s well worth reading into them to make sure that you understand what the requirements are. But honestly, it’s not that bad. I mean, ultimately it really just comes down to you’re way better off not purchasing lists and actually getting people to opt in for real.
09:29
And if they opt in and provide that consent, then you’re pretty much golden no matter where you are. And then in addition to that, you can also and should also be implementing robust protection measures, obtaining proper consent, like we just mentioned, also transparently communicating your data practices and ensuring compliance and build trust with your subscribers. So, as long as you’re clear about what you’re using their data for. And you might see this sort of like as like a trust pilot kind of a thing on the bottom of a form, like we will not sell your data. Right? People have seen better form conversions if they put something down there that says, listen, we just want permission to use your data to contact you or to provide you content not to sell it. We don’t get any other benefit out of this other than what we’re telling you that we do.
10:13
And that will certainly help, I think, on the whole with form conversions so that they know that you’re not going to go and sell that data like we’re kind of getting so used to with all these big tech giants. So that is it for today. Be before we head out, we have a new sponsor, Nurture Labs, who has been really great in helping to get this podcast off the ground. Please check them out and we will see you next time.