Importance of Segmentation in Email Marketing for SEO Success

Communicating with your customers might seem easy from a distance. However, you might realize how difficult it is to retain their loyalty once you dive into the process. 

Let's assume your store sells bathroom essentials. If you send a blanket email promoting towels to all your users, the uninterested recipients will mark your messages as spam. To avoid this and enhance your email campaign performance, start by identifying those interested in towels, bathrobes, or other items. 

How does Email List Segmentation Work? 

Email list segmentation is an approach to categorizing and separating email subscribers into groups based on certain criteria.  

Each subscriber can be a part of multiple email segments depending on age, region, and behavior. The goal is to curate personalized email campaigns, but segmentation is not entirely like personalization. Although both techniques are great for enhancing your email marketing ROI, let's explore some key differences. 

Personalization vs. Segmentation 

Improving user engagement through email personalization involves customizing the content to make it more personal. For instance, they might use elements like a subscriber's first name or their recent purchases.  

On the other end, marketing through email segmentation aims to create content that is more relevant to a group of people. It relies on your ability to curate content for each segment to build your email list and target more precisely. For example, if you sell pet food, you might want to have two separate segments for dog and cat parents. 

How Can Email Segmentation Benefit Your Strategy? 

Here’s how this simple process can transform your entire email marketing strategy: 

Increased Email Click Through Rates 

If you truly want to maximize your email campaign performance, email segmentation offers benefits that are too good to be dismissed. When your solutions align with your customer's preferences, they are more likely to purchase your products. 

By running personalized email campaigns that target specific interests, you can intrigue people to open the emails. The content inside can further encourage them to click the embedded links.  As a result, there will be an increase in email click-through rates because the content says what users want to hear.  

Enable Data-Driven Email Marketing 

Typically, users withdraw from a service when they are constantly flooded with unrelated notifications. Segmentation is a data-driven email marketing approach that will almost never lead to unsubscribes. 

You can use consumer data to define buyer personas and develop content that speaks to them directly. The more relevant your information is, the more valuable it is for them. It means they will not find themselves overwhelmed by irrelevant emails. 

Efficient Email Automation 

Email automation tools are definitely a dream of all email marketers. Most of these tools now come with built-in segmentation to streamline the process of sending targeted emails even more.  

They allow marketers to set up automated workflows that trigger specific emails based on consumer behaviors. Such communications are always time efficient and require minimal effort. Moreover, they do not pose the hassle of errors associated with manual email sending. 

No More Spam Filters 

An ISP can assign a score to any organization that sends emails to its users. That score determines the sender's reputation based on factors like engagement levels and the quality of your contact list. Low engagement signals the service providers that your brand might be sending spam emails. 

Spam filters are there to extract unsolicited emails and filter irrelevant content. If you send one general email to your entire list, it will most likely end up in their spam filter. No matter how good or well-curated that is, it is a waste of effort.  

To avoid such a situation, you might want to segment your lists and only send pertinent information. This way, your content actually reaches them instead of decaying in the spam filter. 

Support Your SEO through Email Marketing 

When users find content that resonates with them, they click through to your website to know more. Let's suppose you run a bakery, and your email contains mouthwatering recipes for tarts or visuals of chocolate cakes. By precisely reaching people who like to grab sugary treats, you lure them into purchasing your products.  

Even if they do not purchase right away, users might go to your website to check your catalog. This way, your email marketing and SEO efforts go hand in hand, as traffic from email impacts your rankings on SERPs. 

Better Customer Experience  

If your customers do not receive a premium-quality experience from your brand, they will not stick around. By tracking their journeys and behaviors, you can provide them with the kind of service they expect from you. When they receive personalized emails, they feel understood and valued by your brand. 

Within this process, you might identify some loyal subscribers, so send them special offers as a token of appreciation. It can help you build a deeper connection with them and foster brand loyalty. 

Boosted in Email Marketing ROI  

All these email segmentation benefits combined lead up to one thing that matters to business owners the most — Return on Investment. 

Business owners who have sent targeted emails through segmentation can vouch for its impact on email marketing ROI. By sending users emails based on where they are in their consumer journey, you guarantee sales, sign-ups, or whatever conversion metric you use. Moreover, it also helps you decrease marketing costs by reducing the number of irrelevant emails sent. 

Advanced Email Segmentation Techniques for Your Subscriber List 

Let's start fresh with our email segmentation strategies. There are some criteria for creating these segments that will almost never get old. You can use them to support your advanced email segmentation strategies and drive maximum results. 

Lifecycle Stage Segmentation 

Are your subscribers new to your community, or are they long-term consumers of your products? Figuring this out before sending an email is important because these two categories want to hear different things from you.  

People new to your business want to know how your products work or add value to their lives. On the other hand, you might want to lay off the marketing emails if they are deep into the sales cycle. 

Abandoned Cart Segmentation 

If you are not keeping up with people who abandon their carts at checkout, you are leaking revenue. So, make a separate segment for these customers. Throw in some personalized elements to win them back and complete their purchase. You can even include a poll to identify the reasons why people are leaving in the first place. 

Inactive Customers Segmentation 

If a chunk of your subscribers doesn't open your emails, don't let that discourage you. In fact, try creating a segment of people who check less than 10% of your emails and target them with a new strategy.  

The new strategy can aim to drive user engagement through personalization or new subject lines. However, you might not want to spam them with too many emails because that might lead to them unsubscribing from your list. 

Change in Behavior Segmentation 

Responding to changes in consumer preferences is one of the most underrated email segmentation strategies. Suppose a customer purchased regularly from you but then suddenly stopped. You must try to figure out what changed their behavior. 

For such cases, you might want to test some re-engagement strategies or send surveys to check what has changed. Maybe they need a little nudge, or your strategy needs an overhaul; you won't know until you ask. 
 

Final Word 

Every person in your email list has a different taste in products and even how they want to be approached. When the customers receive generic emails, they feel undervalued and disappointed. As a result, they withdraw from your list or start ignoring your emails.  

Boosting your open rates and conversions requires some carefully tailored email segmentation strategies. Otherwise, all your hard work will be washed down the drain, and low ROI will have you pulling your hair out. 

Resource:

How is Al Improving Email Marketing Campaigns?