How to Segment Email List for Better Email Conversion This Valentines Day
Every year valentines season brings a chance to spike the first quarter revenue. While your business may not have a clear relation with romance, there’s nothing stopping you from getting on the boat.
Whether online or traditional, businesses can’t help getting in on the massive revenue influx that comes in this time of year. Especially from greeting emails, discount offers and buy-1-get-1’s.
Most businesses usually share their love with valid leads, and that usually means knowing where to look for them. To make this tsunami of email campaigns possible, businesses rely on email marketing softwares that provides efficient contact management, data organization, and marketing tools.
This blog is all about what you can do to make this valentine’s season an opportunity for your business to grow by segmenting your email list.
Segmenting for better email conversion
No doubt email lists are important for running a successful campaign. Having a huge email list and sending thousands of emails only to convert a handful of users is not the definition of success. This is where segmenting your email list comes into play.
To be frank, you can use any number of criteria to segment your email list for valentine’s day email campaign. Whichever you choose largely depends on the type of business and the quality of your contacts. However, there are some criteria that are general got-to’s! With that said, let’s look at the 7 best ways you can segment your email list for valentine’s campaign.
1. Geography
Your customer’s location is a valuable resource when it comes to segmenting. Whether you’re a local or overseas business, you need to know where your contacts are on the map. Especially for running an important campaign such as valentines.
Geographic location helps you pinpoint which of your users are near you or far. For instance, if you ship products overseas you’re very much likely to get customers in varying countries with unique cultural differences. This means the valentines email copy you just cooked up might not convey as effectively as you’d think.
Segmenting based on location lets you control this aspect of your emails. You can add tags based on country/state and create different email copies for each segment. Giving you the freedom to say exactly what you want to say, to the people you want to say it too.
2. Age
People of all ages are on the internet, which means you can’t know for sure who you’re mailing. Knowing the general age range of the people on your list is helpful to separate your target audience from the rest.
For the valentines campaign this can be remarkably effective. Valentines means different things at different ages. When you’re in your teens the flare of valentines is as bright as the summer sun. Come late 20’s that same enthusiasm becomes less obvious.
Your email copies need to reflect the age of the receiver, at least to some extent. But you’re not going to write 3 copies of the same offer email. So what do you do?
You segment your email list based on age, and then write unique copies for each segment. Keep in mind, that younger customers will appreciate a friendlier tone than the boomers. Age information is one of the easiest to collect in terms of opt-in contacts. Being able to use this information can prove to have a huge impact on your campaign performance.
3. Gender
Gender is as important as age when it comes to segmenting your customers. If you have a wide range of products that extends across genders, you could consider segmenting your list in this manner.
If you’re a designated men’s products brand (i.e. Jack and Jones) this has very little impact. However, for gender spanning, the product segment is crucial. Even more so for a valentines campaign if you ask me.
You wouldn’t want to send promotional offers for mens watches exclusively to men. Valentines is essentially about purchasing for partners. So your campaign could benefit from sending promotional products for the opposite gender to your prospective leads.
4. Organization Type
This applies mostly if you’re working with B2B. Depending on whether it’s a franchise, non-profit, e-commerce or an enterprise organization you need to customise your email copies. Essentially because each of these business types have differing priorities and requirements.
Hence, your email content should be catered to the correct type of business. While there might not be much to relate this with a valentines campaign, providing a basic yet warm greeting to your clients is not unheard of and appreciated in most cases.
5. Past Purchases
Purchase history is an incredible resource for segmenting your list. If contacts on your list have purchased from you before, you can make an informed guess on what they’ll be interested in next.
For previous purchasers you can make your bottom line bigger to include upsell opportunities with additional services or products that are most relevant.
Take for example, you run Woocommerce site selling gift cards. Now, for the contacts that have already made a purchase – you can take a look at what cards they’ve bought. It would be redundant to send these people offers on the same gift cards they’ve already purchased. The best thing to do here is to segment contacts based on the purchase history.
This way you can make sure that no contact gets redundant offers. To make the best use, you should target these customers with new gift cards for valentines that resemble the design or concept of the card they’ve already bought.
6. Content Topic
It should come to you as no surprise if some of your customers are more interested in a certain product/series over others on your website. No to people are the same and that is important to remember. Even if people like the same product it could be for vastly different reasons.
You could have a group of users extremely interested in sales and marketing, while another is far more interested in programming and web applications. So it only makes sense to segment your list based on the topics your contacts have shown interest in.
Sending a free programming crash course to a literature student is hardly a good call to make. Relevance is everything when it comes to email success. With these segments you can design detailed email campaigns and sequences to keep the relevance high.
7. Change in Buying Behavior
Similar to content interest, a change in buying behavior can also open new grounds to apply segmentation. For example, leads that decrease purchasing frequency might be on their way out of your subscribers list. A dedicated lead nurturing campaign can make a massive difference when it comes to holding on to these leads.
While using buying behavior isn’t as easy as the previous options, you’ll see significant gains if you use it properly.
Here another example, imagine some of your users bought a discount product from your new years sales campaign while others opted in for your subscription through a giveaway last valentines. It would be a good call to segment discount buyers from the new year sale and valentines giveaway.
Now you can direct major discount offers towards the new year buyers while sending a one time promo code to valentines opt-in users. Segmenting with buying behaviour can save you tons of money on emails while also letting your customers find the best deals. Win-Win for everybody.
Email tips for this valentines campaigns
For this valentines, you must have an email marketing campaign planned out. Or, you have products picked out to boost with discounts or buy-1-get-1’s. There are a ton of ways to grab your subscribers attention. We’ve put together a few ways to generate more from your campaigns.
Tailor
“Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches – at scale.”
– David Newman
There is hardly anything left unsaid when it comes to tailoring you emails. As we mentioned before, tailoring your emails is your best option for providing users an authentic and unique experience.
Segmenting helps you send the right content to the right audience. You can even tailor specific templates for a user who’s interested in a product you know of. This is a common example here at our office, where we track user’s previous purchases and only send them the relevant products.
Personalize
“Personalization—it is not about first/last name. It’s about relevant content.”
Although the quote itself is self explanatory it’s still worth shedding some light. Swapping out the last names in an email copy doesn’t convey personalization in the slightest. It’s moreover considered as a best practice.
To actually make your emails feel personal you need to craft it to perfection. Personalizing the email essentially means you have to put things in a particular light according to the users information.
What makes the most difference here is to provide relevant content based on segmentation and tags. You can highlight their previous purchase and suggest similar products, or offer discount coupons that are most likely to be used.
Personalization emails in and of itself deserves an article of its own. We’ll cover that some day in the future. The idea is to be clever about bringing that personalized feel with smart segmentation of your contact list.
Re-engage
“Customer Loyalty is mostly about choosing the right customers.”
The last tip for today is targeting the leads you feel are falling out of touch. You can segment users based on buying behavior to see who is ready for a gentle tap on the shoulder. Sending these leads a valentines greeting with a free ebook or live session pass can rekindle the relationship.
Segmenting helps you track down these leads efficiently. After all, your regular customers deserve a different sort of attention than the ones who have become distant. Re-engaging can liven up your email list letting you cash in on the leads you worked hard to collect.
Wanna learn more about marketing automation and email campaigns? Head over to maximizing email marketing potential!
Ending Remarks
Valentines sales is an effective strategy to boost company revenue. All of it depends on how efficiently you use the information available to you. Whether it is user activity on your website or email interaction on your CRM you need to have this information up-to-date. Only then can you develop effective strategies to make your valentines campaign a success.
Before you leave…
Did you know that you can have your own CRM system within the convenience of WordPress? Yes, FluentCRM is a self-hosted CRM that works in the WordPress dashboard, lets you segment your contacts, be it a purchase or be it according to your user’s gender. It also has fantastic email campaign management, email sequencing, and marketing automation features with granular reporting so that you can relax in autopilot while FluentCRM does the job.
Besides, FluentCRM integrates with the popular WordPress plugins and lets you centralize the data of your customer, student, affiliate, the member so that you can use them to maximize your marketing potential without switching tabs. So if you’re running an e-commerce, Learning management, affiliate, or membership site, we highly recommend FluentCRM for you!
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