Digital Darwinism is a phenomenon where technology and consumer behavior evolve faster than a company’s capability to adapt to the change.
And by chance, it has taken over the business arena and turned it into a lucrative space racing to meet its customers’ needs.
A large number of users trust emails to carry out professional conversations. Also, marketers have found it to be a potent form of content marketing. To make email marketing more convenient, they take the help of readymade Salesforce or Marketo templates or free HTML email templates. But, more often than not, emails are left unread or redirected to the spam folder.
And a fierce marketer like you might question the viability of email marketing as a sub-set of content marketing.
But, as they say, the right mix of things can always invite new buyers.
So, let’s begin!
If you’re sending out mass emails to your subscribers, you’ve got a problem!
Because it is the era of personalization!
The first step to send relevant emails is to identify your buyers’ persona. It is a faux character that carries all the qualities that your prospective buyers possess – demographics, location, tastes, and preferences, etc.
When creating a buyers’ persona, you’ll realize that 90% of your customers possess similar characteristics as the persona, and the remaining 10% may not.
And that is where your segmentation begins!
You begin by dividing your current and prospective buyers in the 90/10 category. After that, you’ll need to follow these steps;
1) Demographic Division
When creating a buyers’ persona, you come across various demographic questions about your prospective buyer. The idea is to be as specific as you can to allow better penetration to the niches.
After you’ve narrowed down the persona, you’ll need to go through yet another round of demographic division to segment your prospects based on their gender, interests, narrowed income range, etc. This step will allow you to divide your niche into smaller groups.
Pro Tip: The key to the perfect email marketing strategy lies in a clean segmentation of your prospects and then curating content based on the parameters.
You must remember that each industry has different target parameters. For example, fashion retail will focus on gender and income level; a B2B digital marketing company will focus on the company’s size and position; an e-commerce grocery store will focus on the location of its customers and the preferences around that location.
Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor are two such tools that can help you with the demographic division.
2) Tier Of The Consumer Funnel
A consumer funnel indicates the purchase stage that your prospective buyer is currently on and helps you nudge them forward.
As fellow-marketers, we all know that cart abandonment is a serious issue for the company’s sales. An average cart abandonment rate is 69.57%, across various industries, and it can go as high as 80%.
And this means only 30% of your customers successfully travel through the funnel.
Email marketing can help you nudge your customers forward.
For each level of the consumer funnel, you must curate persuasive content that keeps them coming back for more.
For example, you can send emails to the consumers about their pending purchase for all the abandoned carts.
Pro Tip: Just as you’re personalizing your email for varied consumers, you must also customize your cart abandoned email to ensure conversion.
3) Three Important Attributes To Categorize Buyers
Apart from creating a faux buyer, there are three essential attributes to consider while segmenting.
Recurring Buyers: Under this category, you club all the buyers that buy from your store frequently. Such segmentation allows you to curate customized offers for the group and ensures a lower churn rate. In fact, early-bird purchase offers, specific discounts, and promotional products allow your frequent buyers to put their trust in your store even further. For example, Amazon allows its prime members an early look at the launch of its product, giving them an upper hand.
One-Time Buyers: This is a group of skeptical buyers who buy from you once in six months or later. For such a group, sending them information about products based on their last purchase is a great way to rope them in and convert them into frequent buyers. One of the reasons for their skepticism may be the lack of trust in the company. So, as a marketer, you must send them positive news and PR about the company to build confidence with subscribers.
Amount Spent On Purchases: Given that the business arena is a free market, one product has different price ranges. And each time a consumer makes a purchase, it reflects the amount they are willing to spend on any product. Based on this factor, you segment your group of customers and send them customized product information, considering their purchase history.
Pro Tip: Sometimes, customers may shift through groups due to changing income levels or external factors. As vigilant marketers, you must be quick to identify the shift.
So, Is That It?
As I mentioned earlier, each industry has different ways of segmenting their niches. Through this blog, I’ve tried to generalize the techniques to ease the process and ensure maximum conversion. Within these three techniques, I’ve covered a comprehensive idea of the segmentation process. While there are a plethora of other techniques, but as someone who has a battle-field experience of email segmentation, this is pretty much all that you’ll need!
Author Bio
Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, that specializes in crafting Professional Email Templates, PSD to Email conversion, and Custom Mailchimp Templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog.