There’s a lot of mystery surrounding email segmentation. Who to target, how to do it efficiently and what results you should expect.

However, developing your segmentation strategy doesn’t have to mean spending hours devising multiple versions of emails or pouring over data. The technology is already available for you to automate your segmentation, meaning you can reduce your workload while increasing your efficiency.

In fact, researchers report relevant email communications drive 18 times more revenue than mass broadcasts (Jupiter Research) making every email you send more efficient at generating ROI. This means you don’t need to spend as much time sending multiple campaigns to reach your targets.

In part two of our guide we look at how to target people based on their interests. We suggest a few tactics and tools you can employ without much fuss or extra work.

If you’ve not read part one yet then don’t forget to see how you can cover the basics of segmentation before moving onto the methods below.

Don’t guess, just ask

Many marketers spend time creating customer profiles, building-up a picture of who their customer is and what they think they’ll like. Customer profiling can sound impressive but the truth is that it’s still often guesswork. The simplest way to find out what someone is interested in is by asking them. Introducing a customer preference centre into your email sign-up process on your website is a great way to ask people what they’d like to hear about. You can then make sure you create emails using content that’s relevant to their interests. And this doesn’t mean manually producing lots of different versions of your emails – simply use dynamic content to automatically customise emails as they are being sent.

Follow what I do, not what I say

Stating a list of interests only tells half the story and sometimes people may tell you one thing and then do another. PureTargeting is a great tool which tracks a visitor’s actions on your website and then automatically sends relevant emails based on their behaviour. This means you can be sure you’re contacting them at the perfect time – when you’re currently top of mind. PureTargeting will enable you to target the most relevant content to your customers based on what they’ve browsed, abandoned or clicked, making it the ultimate tool to send targeted and relevant content.

Give them more of what they love

If you’re a retailer then a simple way of generating more revenue is to send automatic replenishment emails. To do this simply segment your customers by what products they’ve purchased and send a timely email when you think they’ll be ready to purchase again. By triggering another purchase you’re hopefully retaining their custom – which becomes even more important when you remember that it’s three times more expensive to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one (Invespcro, 2015). Replenishment emails can easily be automated and triggered after a pre-set time period from the initial purchase. They’re also a great addition to a lifecycle marketing strategy, slotting in nicely after a customer review email and before a reactivation campaign.

So there you are – three simple and clear ways to up your game without over-complicating your email strategy. The technology and tools used to develop your approach to segmentation are simple to use and quick to implement. Give your Account Manager a call if you’d like to find out more.

Stay tuned for part three of our series where we look at how you can cross-sell and prompt behaviours with practical yet advanced segmentation strategies.




Download the Advanced Email Series: Segmentation Guide