Improve email conversions with better segmentation

It’s a challenge most marketers are familiar with. You spend all this time on an email one-off or nurture stream. You craft the perfect copy, write a witty, engaging subject line, and even throw in some compelling graphics for good measure. And nothing happens. Maybe you get a decent open rate, and even a few click throughs. But you didn’t get anywhere near the conversions you had projected. For whatever reason, your email just isn’t resonating like you intended. Now you’re behind on goal and need to make up for those missed customers in other channels, putting a greater strain on your entire marketing team. And the kicker? You didn’t really do anything wrong.

The importance of segmentation

Email marketing is a funny thing. You could have the best writer in the world and craft all sorts of variations of copy, but if the targeting is wrong, the email will fail. No amount of A/B testing can help you woo an unengaged, non-specific email audience. It’s not enough anymore to simply target a marketing audience with a marketing offer. That audience is made up of a wide range of personas, job titles, and interests within the marketing discipline. There’s no way that a single offer could possibly speak to all of them.

Furthermore, broad email targeting can actually have the opposite of your intended effect. Rather than creating a wide net to capture as many conversions as possible, an excessively large email list can actually cause bulking. When you send too many emails or very low engagement emails, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) will essentially downgrade your credibility as a sender. The result? Your emails start getting delivered to junk folders (or not delivered at all). That’s why specific segmentation is crucial to the success of your email marketing program.

Segment smarter & personalize your outreach

Obviously everyone is using segmentation to some degree when running their email marketing campaigns. But failing to segment sufficiently can still result in bulking and a damaged email reputation.

For example, if you’re a larger enterprise and you’re promoting a marketing ebook, it makes logical sense to send that email promotion to anyone with a marketing title. But in a large database, it’s very possible that a list of all marketers could be in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. And of those, many will be inactive users or low quality accounts. Plus, of the emails that do reach engaged users, many will likely be turned off or annoyed by the constant barrage of correspondence they receive from you. As a result, you’ll be marked as spam or unsubscribed from, hurting both your brand and email reputation.

An easy way to avoid being moved to the junk folder and boost conversions is to add a personal touch to your email outreach. In fact, personalized email marketing has been proven to increase revenue by up to 760%. We lay out several ways to personalize your email outreach in detail in another blog post here, but for your convenience I’ve also summarized them below.

• Understand your email service provider (ESP): Understand what personalization capabilities your ESP offers you. Making emails more customized and targeted towards specific segments of customers improves conversions and keeps your reputation intact.
• Get to know your audience: Take the time to learn about your audience. Not just their demographic data, but their content consumption, their behavioral patterns. Really get to know what makes them tick.
• Get to know your content: What content is hitting with your customers? What isn’t? Build content around topics people are actually interested in.
• Understand the metrics that matter: opens, clicks, bounces, deliverability rate, etc. and know how to leverage these to optimize your efforts.

Understanding your audience and their content preferences is an essential aspect of a winning email strategy. But finding this data isn’t always easy. And without it, specific segmentation is nearly impossible. That’s why we created a solution…

Cloud Connect: the ultimate segmentation solution

Lytics Cloud Connect is the one-size-fits-all link between your data warehouse and your downstream email tools. Rather than building out and maintaining several one-off connectors to individual tools and platforms, Cloud Connect saves your developers time and makes your data actionable by streaming data from your data warehouse to ALL of your downstream tools.

Here’s how it works for email:

Your marketing team wants to promote a new ebook they wrote on how to build a team as a marketing executive. They give specific segmentation criteria to one of your developers. The developer then writes an SQL query against your cloud data warehouse to find the users who meet all of the following guidelines:

• Are in the marketing persona
• Have a VP+ job title
• Have shown active engagement with similar pieces of content in the last month

Once the segment is created in your data warehouse, it can be easily shipped into your email platform, (Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, Hubspot, SendGrid, Mailchimp and many more), for immediate use in your campaigns.

It’s that easy. With a simple query, you’ve quickly created an emailable segment of highly engaged and targeted users who are likely to convert on the offer. Now instead of emailing vague, boring, spam worthy marketing content, you can email your customers content they actually want, all at scale.

Cloud Connect enables easy email segmentation in your data warehouse. Now you can offer customers a highly personalized email experience that fuels a higher open rate and increased conversions. Plus, a great email marketing program can help you build loyalty and retain your best buyers by providing them with recommendations and products tailored to their specific needs.

Click here to get started with Cloud Connect and test your first segments free today.

For more on Cloud Connect, check out our introductory blog.