Are You Doing Email Segmentation The Right Way?

by MGB2B

B2B email segmentationA lot of people think that the timing of your email is the most important factor to consider in B2B email marketing. And yes, timing is important. But there’s something that is even more important for both boosting your open rates and CTR, and lowering your unsubscribes and abuse reports: segmentation.

If you’re not already segmenting your email lists, it’s something you should look into as soon as possible. According to stats recently released by Mail Chimp, segmented campaigns have on average a 10.33% higher unique open rate. And clicks? Those are 62.81% higher. That’s pretty mind-blowing. If you’re anything like your competitors, that’s all the encouragement you need (most marketers cite increasing subscriber engagement as their number one priority in 2016 and improving segmentation as their second).

But for those of you who are saying, “I get it, I get it. I do this stuff already – you don’t have to tell me,” I ask you this: HOW are you segmenting? There’s more than one way to do it. And each one you add to the list can make your email campaigns more and more effective.

The four different approaches Mail Chimp looked at were:

  • Merge Fields. The csv files of leads you import and most likely your data capture forms have fields that can help you segment your list. For instance, let’s say you’re having a special promotion, but it’s only via your distributors in Michigan. One of your merge fields is likely “State,” so you can use that to target all of your prospects with businesses in Michigan. You can also segment by fields like age, gender, job title – whatever categories you use to build and define your prospect list.
  • Signup Date/Date Added. If you want to remind old subscribers how awesome you are or offer a special insight that only applies to your newest subscribers, you can segment based on when they were added to your prospect database.
  • Interest Groups. This is probably the most common way to segment lists, and with good reason. Clicks are 83.34% higher when you segment your lists by interests. That’s likely because it makes it easy to deliver highly targeted and relevant insights to these groups. What’s interesting to a chemical engineer might be extremely different from what’s interesting to a purchasing officer. Yet both of them are on your decision-making chain. Segmenting allows you to fine-tune your message so it will resonate for each of your different target audiences, and hence, get more clicks to your web content.
  • Subscriber Activity. You sent an email – the question is how did each person interact with your campaign? Maybe you have a white paper that you’ve revised and want to test out ONLY on those who didn’t open the original. Or perhaps you have an infographic that will only make sense to those who opened your last three emails. Many email programs allow you to segment down to the smallest details so that you can really drill down your message.

I’d also like to add one more equally important segmentation option to Mail Chimp’s list:

  • Past Purchases. This is only an option if you have e-commerce on your website and if you use a robust email and/or CRM platform that gives you access to this information. But when you know what your subscribers are buying from you, it makes it a lot easier to know what else they might want to buy down the road. Amazon and Zappos do this to me all the time, and it works. It’s the same for B2B marketers. In addition to sending new product suggestions to this segment, you can also send them insightful content that is tailored to their purchase preferences.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Depending on what programs you’re using for your email campaigns, there are a multitude of ways to segment your email lists. The key is to set aside a large chunk of time to go over what you’ve been doing so far and figure out the best way to fine-tune your program. Then set aside another large chunk of time to watch your open and click rates rise.

Tags: , , , , ,
 

Be the first to comment “Are You Doing Email Segmentation The Right Way?”