How to segment your audience for email marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most powerful ways to stay in contact with your audience. Brands of all sizes leverage the incredible reach and retention rates offered by their painstakingly nurtured mailing lists to broadcast offers, advice, and more to their customer bases. 

As many as 333.2 billion emails are sent and received via email every single day and that number is expected to balloon to an even more astounding 376.4 billion daily messages in just three years. Tapping into such a massively growing communication space with your own messages is an excellent bet for your organization’s future—but only if you do it effectively.

Email marketing may be extremely popular, but its success as a medium for communication between brands and customers is a bit of a double-edged sword. Owing to the volume of messages that most people receive in their inboxes, information overload can set in quickly. When fatigue from all the noise sets in, potential customers quickly stop clicking to open new messages and just call it a day. 

To avoid being drowned out by all the noise, email marketers need to adapt their messages to appeal to each of their recipients. Naturally, no one could reasonably justify hand-typing personalized emails for hundreds of thousands of people every time a newsletter is drafted, but a close compromise is drafting more than one version of each marketing message and sending each one to the most appropriate portion of your audience. This is what audience segmentation is all about.

How audience segmentation works

Audience segmentation works by slicing out certain portions of your mailing list and adapting marketing messages to match their unique characteristics. How you go about doing this can vary quite a bit, especially considering how different email marketing service providers often offer unique functionality designed to assist with this process. However, the general idea is always the same: You segment your audience based on a set of factors and then deliver different messages to each of these segments. To start, you’ll need to choose which factors matter most to your business.

Types of audience segmentation

You can approach segmenting your audience in a number of different ways, depending on your objectives and needs. The strategy you choose should account not only for the types of services and products you intend to promote to recipients but also for the recipients themselves. Segmenting your email list by purchase history, for instance, can be just as effective as segmenting based on message open rates or referral sources.

Here are a few audience segmentation examples that illustrate some of the different types of segmentation you can use:

• By activity (or inactivity): This is a particularly useful way to split up your mailing lists as it allows you to focus on spurring engagement from your less active subscribers while avoiding disturbing those who are already reasonably engaged with your messaging.
• By psychographic characteristics: Psychographic characteristics encompass everything from someone’s personal interests to their values and ideals. By segmenting your audience along these lines, you can craft messaging that appeals to them on a deeper level and meshes well with the beliefs they hold.
• By demographic characteristics: All of the outward characteristics of your audience qualify as demographic characteristics. Segmenting your audience in this way works well when you need to tailor your messaging for specific age groups, income levels, etc.

Using an audience segmentation framework

With an audience segmentation framework, you can take the segmenting techniques mentioned above even further. By utilizing two or more sets of segmentation criteria, you can create incredibly finely tailored messaging for hyper-specific customer groups. Effectively leveraging such an approach practically requires the use of software sophisticated enough to automate segmentation processes in real time.

For instance, when a subscriber fails to engage with your messages, they should be moved automatically to an appropriate audience segment to match their decreased activity level. This same subscriber should then be sorted into a segment that combines their activity level with their transaction history, demographic details, or some other differentiator. A framework succeeds at singling out groups of users for highly targeted marketing by utilizing multiple levels of segmentation to gain implicit insight into their interests.

Get more out of your email marketing campaign 

Audience segmentation is a super-effective way to make bigger waves among your subscribers. However, implementing your segmenting strategy effectively requires high-quality software built for this purpose. With Lytics’ Customer Data Platform, you can quickly build custom audience segments based on predefined behaviors and target them with unique messaging. Lytics simplifies the process of tapping into data as it’s provided to you by your customers and recenters your efforts on making a valuable connection with impeccable timing. 

Give Lytics a try today to learn what else it can do for you.