It’s a fact: Emails perform better when targeted to the customer segments most likely to buy what’s being offered. Marketers can target based on many factors, depending on data available for customer segmentation.
Here are four approaches you can take. Pick the most relevant attribute for your business and use it to split up your list:
Purchase:
When did they last place an order? How many orders have they placed over a period of time? How much did they spend, at the category level? Use RFM data to send more focused communications to segments with the best potential.
Preference:
Men’s, women’s, or kids clothes? Styles and trends? Brands and models? Travel destinations of interest? Ask your subscribers to indicate their buying interests when they sign up or reactivate; or use purchase behavior to infer preference.
Status:
New, returning or lapsed customer? If they’re frequent buyers, recommend cross-sell or upsell items — based on customer purchase data. If they’re recently inactive, try drawing them back. Or if this is a first-time opt-in or purchase, greet her with a targeted welcome series. And if they just abandoned their shopping cart, send a timely email featuring the products they were about to buy.
Browse:
What products or categories have been browsed but not purchased? Website behavior can tell a lot about a person’s interests, so send emails based on the pages they visited.
Let’s look at an example of how more segmented mailings outperform their less targeted counterparts. Below are two graphs showing how a brand’s average depth of file – or the percentage of the list that each mailing consists of – relates to the read rate (or open rate) for each mailing. The lower the depth of file means that the list has been segmented more.
For Mercola (on the left), the higher open rate is a function of more targeted mailings. For Infowars (on the right), most of the mailings were untargeted and widely distributed; as a result they have lower read rates.
So test segmenting your list to optimize content to targeted groups within your file. As a result, your campaigns more relevant to recipients, and you will get better open, click and conversion rates.
