Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to convey your message and promote your products or services. It helps you reach out to the masses and generate awareness about your brand.
The prerequisite of designing an effective email marketing campaign is to have an email list full of people who are interested in what you have to offer. But segmenting your email list is easier said than done. Even seasoned email marketers make mistakes when doing it.
In this blog, we’ll discuss the noteworthy email marketing segmentation mistakes you should know and avoid.
What is email segmentation?
Segmentation is a powerful email marketing strategy, which is one reason 78% of marketers use it. It’s the process of splitting your email list into small groups based on characteristics such as demographics, goals, location, behavior and buying history. Put all of this together, and you can create content that’s perfectly personalized for each group.
It’s one of the best ways to increase your open rates and convince recipients to take action. Research shows that, on average, segmented campaigns see 14.31% more opens than non-segmented messages.
Now, let’s look at a few segmenting mistakes you need to avoid if you want to take your email marketing strategy to the next level:
1. Not scrubbing your email list
Of course, growing your email list is essential for optimal campaign results as it helps convey your message to more people and promote your solutions. However, sometimes, removing recipients from your email list is necessary. Segmenting an email list enhances the relevance of the messages you send to recipients.
Your segmented email list should focus on engaged recipients to get the best results from your efforts.
To help with this process, your processes, consider online newsletter platforms that enable automated email list cleaning and management.
2. Disregarding data
Being intuitive is the key to being a successful marketer. It helps you think quickly and make the most of available opportunities. However, it doesn’t mean that you just rely on your gut and completely disregard the data.
It’s best to know about your target audience and be familiar with their needs or preferences. You must know what defines your target audience and make decisions accordingly. For this, you must use data and gather insights about your audience.
One of the common mistakes you can make as an email marketer is not segmenting your email list based on relevant data. Your goal is to take into account the demographic and psychographic characteristics defining your recipients and creating different personas. This can have significant impact on the open rates and results you drive through your email marketing campaigns.
3. Segmenting without a goal
When you segment your email list, you should know why you’re doing it. Without knowing your purpose for creating email segments, you may end up picking the wrong factor to define your groups.
Imagine designing an upselling email campaign and excluding repeat customers from the targeted segment. You are compromising the performance of your campaign by your own hands.
When you consider that close to 77% of email return on investment comes from segmented campaigns, it’s clear that setting a goal before you start is crucial to your success.
4. Not testing the segments
You can segment your email list by considering different demographic and psychographic characteristics. However, picking the right ones for grouping also is important.
You can create different segments reflecting age, sex, location, buying history and other factors. However, there’s no sure-shot way of knowing that a particular segment will give you the desired results. Therefore, it’s best to test different segments before moving ahead with your email marketing campaigns.
To do this, send your message to a small chunk and assess the results you get from the activity.
There’s no right or wrong way of segmenting your email list. Only through testing will you know if a particular segment will work for you to run a successful email marketing campaign.
5. Losing the master list
Segmenting your email list into small groups is the key to designing targeted emails. However, you shouldn’t lose the master list in the process.
A mistake email marketers often make is that they compile a master list by gathering emails from a relevant audience and then split the list into different groups. They modify the original data while doing so rather than working on the copy.
You may get your segments this way but also lose the original file, which makes it difficult to create new segments in the future or modify the existing ones.
Note that, when you split your master list into different groups, there’s no guarantee that the segments you created will work for you. You may have to go back to the drawing board multiple times until you are able to create email segments that drive optimal results.
Remember to maintain a master email list and keep growing it through lead magnets, web forms and other useful tactics. Always use a copy of your original list for email segmentation.
Wrapping up
Segmenting your email lists enables you to design highly targeted email campaigns and convey personalized messages while increasing the odds for high open rates and improving the deliverability of the emails.
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