Now a days, email remains one of the most popular and versatile mediums available. Email marketing is a strategy used by many businesses, and can be defined as the following:

Email marketing is the method of sending a commercial message to a desired person, or set of people, via email. This usually includes any email communication sent to an existing or potential customer.

Email marketing become more effective using segmentations

Email marketing segmentation is the Practice of thinking in groups. Your email list consists of different kind of people, with different behavior, profiles, and interests. But if your subscribers are so different, why treat them all the same? The solution is spoken more intelligently and directly with your customers, giving them information that they want at the opportune time.

 Simply Segmentation is the division of email subscribers into smaller segments based on set criteria. Segmentation is an inevitable part of email marketing for E-Commerce & Affiliate marketing businesses.

Now we can approach each email segment in a way that is right for them. We can understand it with example of E-Commerce business. An e-commerce business has diverse customers and subscribers with varied demographics, interests, behavior, location, browsing history, purchase history, cart abandonment, and Inactive subscriber. It is necessary to create emails that are as relevant to each individual as possible.

List segmentation is help in following ways-

Quick and easy Email marketing segmentation strategy

There are no hard-and-fast rules about what information you can and can’t use for list segmentation. Once you start layering segmentation criteria, the possibilities are almost endless. It is only limited by the available data.

There are four quick and easy segmentation strategies that will help you to segment your list.

1. Demographics

Demographic data includes any quantifiable characteristics of a person:  Age, gender, income, education, social status, family, company position occupation can tell a lot about person’s need and interest. The more information you can get about your audience in the sign-up process, the more options you’ll have for demographic segmentation. Decide which metrics are most essential for your business and include those questions in the signup process. Age and gender are two of the most common forms of demographic segmentation because consumer preferences continually change with age. Almost all marketing campaigns target age-specific audiences. Men and women generally have different likes, dislikes, needs, and thought processes. Markets can also be segmented by income, occupation, and education level. If people can’t afford your product or service, there is no point in targeting them. Income targeting lets you measure the buying power of your audience.

List can also be segmented by Ethnicity and religion level.  With the tremendous increase in international business and global advertising, brings an increase in segmentation based on ethnicity, race, nationality, and religion. These groups have many individual cultures that come with conflicting interests, preferences, attitudes, and beliefs. This could impact both their response to marketing and their buying habits.

2. Behavioral

Behavior data includes any Purchases, opens, clicks, website browsing, etc. It is extremely important not to let this go to waste. It might be a bit harder to get that data prepped for marketing purposes, but once it is set-up it can be a great indicator for future interests and behavior. Email engagement is another very basic way to segment your lists, but it can have a huge impact on your overall results.  Open rate and click through rate are the main metrics here, which you keep track of in your email marketing service. You can segment by engagement by designating active vs inactive users. Segmenting by past purchases is another simple way to optimize targeting. The easiest way is to start sending out email recommendations for similar items or accessories that would go well with their previous purchase. Keeping track of website behavior is another simple way to get more information about visitors interests. You can also send out targeted emails based on website activity, such as:

• Pages people visited
• Pages they didn’t visit
• People who visited one page but missed another related page
• What videos they watched.

3. Geographic’s

Geographic segmentation splits your audience depending on where they are located. Geographic data include any Country, city, density, language, climate, area, population, Location and related data. All of these parameters help companies to geographically target markets where specific customers or more buyers of their products are present. This provides an effective direction for marketing activity towards those areas that benefit the most. There are a lot of different ways to use geographic location data, making segmentation by geographic area a valuable tool – especially for businesses where location greatly influences purchasing decisions. Companies can use geographic data send your emails at optimum times for customers in different time zones. Send focused emails for events in certain store locations.

4. Psycho-graphics

Psychographic segmentation is a method used to group prospective, current or previous customers by their lifestyle, meaning Attitudes, Interests, Concern, personality, values and Opinions. When you’re obvious groupings of target segments seem to have radically different needs and responses to your offerings and messaging, this is a major indicator it is a good time to look at psychographic segmentation. There are many different ways to segment a market along psychographic dimensions, but the most popular are personality traits, life-cycle stage, interests, attitudes or beliefs, and activities. Marketers could also differentiate between groups of consumers based on their buying priorities, social class, income, and more.

So what to conclude ?

Each of your customers has a unique background, set of interests, and level of experience with your brand. So don’t send all of them the same emails by the using of list segmentation, it’s easy to personalize your message based on the recipient’s interests, demographic information, and purchase history.

So you can use this list segmentation feature with a simple email marketing service and a bit of creativity, you can start targeting your audience from today.