Market segmentation is an important aspect of email marketing that you cannot afford to skip over. Segmentation is simply the process of identifying specific and meaningful groups of customers that you can target with specific messages, products and / or services in a way that resonates with them.
Why You Need to Segment
Segmenting your email list, no matter how small, is an important step toward boosting customer loyalty, increasing purchasing and it will help spark your creativity in terms of creating new products and services for your customers.
- Boost Customer Loyalty
- Increase Purchasing
- Spark Creativity
You can introduce some very simple segmentation into your email marketing using your autoresponder’s segmentation features. Most autoresponders offer some sort of segmenting features. If it doesn’t, then you need to switch services because segmentation is an important tool to use that will make all your marketing efforts exponentially more effective.
How to Segment
First, decide how you want to segment your list members. A great way to start with segmenting is to segment based on behavior. Separating those who have purchased a specific item from those who have not is a good first step.
You can even segment subscribers from the beginning of their subscription by putting different sign up forms on each landing page they use to sign up for your email list. Aweber makes it a simple and straight forward process and these are the segmenting features available. Other autoresponders will likely have similar options.
- Segmenting with Forms – You can include segmentation criteria right on a sign up form. Male from female, income levels, topics of interest and more. You can do this by adding questions that a subscriber clicks, and you can also do it by putting a different sign up form on different landing pages.
- Behavioral Segmenting – You can segment based on who clicks various links in your email messages. You can do it via a link inside a normal message, or you can set up a poll specifically designed to assign people to various lists based on their answers. You can incentivize clicks by offering coupons, free downloads, letting subscribers choose their sales and more.
- Surveys & Poll Segmentation – You can send buyers, subscribers, and list members surveys and polls that segment them based on their answers or in the case of some, their lack of answers. This is a great way to segment list members after they’ve signed up.
- Give Members Self Segmenting Options – With Aweber you can actually include self-segmenting options in specific messages such as a rating scale so that your readers can rate your messages, products and services, thus adding them to a specific segment of your list.
Each of these ideas works by providing a special link to your subscribers that takes them to a hidden page on your website once they click it. Then by clicking it they also, due to the code involved, automatically get added to the specific list based on the segmentation criteria. Once it’s set up, inside your autoresponder service, it runs itself and is pretty hands off.
Segmenting customers from prospects is a good starting point into email marketing segmentation. When you do that, you’ll be able to better personalize and target your email marketing messages to make a bigger impact on their future behavior and increase sales exponentially.
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