I remember purchasing 2 new pairs of shoes from a local shop and they asked for my email address at checkout. I don’t always give out my email address but in this case I didn’t mind and I was actually looking forward to getting their emails because I was a fan of the shoes and if there was a sale I would like to know about it.
The first email I got from them was a sale alright… on ladies shoes… I’m a guy. It made an impression on me and I remember thinking how inconsiderate it was that they didn’t send me emails relevant to men’s shoes only. Now after developing Campayn and being in the email biz I also realize the challenges with segmenting.
Most businesses have a wide range of clients and a single one-size-fits-all message usually won’t work as well as several targeted relevant ones. The more data you keep on customers the more relevant your emails can become…. emails and names are just the beginning.
Ways To Segment
Gender
If you have different products for men and women, Campayn does try to guess the gender based on the first name of your contact. It’s relatively accurate and always learning based on your input but you’re also able to manually update the gender. If you already have the gender information in your database then you can import it with your CSV when you upload your list.
Geography
You have offers that are specific to a certain location. We’ll help you with this by adding in locations of where your contacts opened your email from.
Interest Level
Send more frequently to those that open and engage with more of your emails.
Date Added
Re-engage previous customers with a winback email.
Stage in Sales Cycle
Send different messages to prospects vs clients. Maybe your list contains both prospects and customers and you need to send different messaging to each. There are a couple of ways you can do this. You can manage 2 separate lists and remember to add them to the customers list and unsubscribe them from the prospects list as they become customers or have a custom ‘Stage’ field with words like ‘prospect’ and ‘customer’ and then as you update the stage they will automatically be put into the right segment.
Tip: There’s many more ways to use segmenting and you can be creative by using custom fields to segment almost any type of data.
The benefits to segmenting are not just to those that you are sending to but those that you are choosing not to send to because they don’t fit as well. It takes a long time to acquire new email contacts so do you really want to risk upsetting them with irrelevant emails?