Is Email Segmenting Worth It?
Maximize Email Effectiveness With Segmented Lists
For many integrators, email marketing is the great unknown. You send out messages into the void and hope that those emails result in potential customers. But the truth is that email marketing is far more strategic than just throwing emails at the customer dartboard and crossing your fingers for the bullseye. Below, we break down one of the top newsletter marketing strategies, email segmenting, and go over some quantifiable metrics that show why it’s worth pursuing.
What Is Email Segmenting?
If you’re just getting started with newsletter marketing, you may not know much about email segmenting. So here’s the skinny: email segmenting is taking your master list of contacts and breaking it down into subsections. You can segment by location, trade, date added to the list, prospect vs. repeat customer, etc. You can even segment contacts by how engaged they are with your marketing efforts.
SEE ALSO: Why We Love Newsletters
Why Should You Segment?
Especially if you have a large contact list, email segmenting can be a daunting task. That’s because there’s really no way to automate the process of sifting through each contact and assigning it to a different list. A software program can’t tell if
While that approach is better than not sending out any newsletters, it loses out on a very important aspect of email marketing: sending information that is valuable to the reader.
John Doe might be very interested in learning about the latest home automation trends for new construction, but he’s probably not going to want to read a newsletter about the benefits of investing in a two-channel audio system for a dedicated listening room.
So what happens when you repeatedly send John Doe newsletters that don’t have any relevance or value to him? He checks out. When that monthly newsletter pops up a notification in his email inbox, his first reaction isn’t to open it immediately. Instead, he might just hit “Delete” or “Unsubscribe,” which loses an opportunity to gain his business in the future.
Consider the alternative: you segment your contact list into residential customers, commercial customers, interior designers, and builders. The first month, the content might only apply to residential customers and interior designers. The next month might be a good fit for commercial customers. The following month might have great insight for builders.
When John gets that email every few months, he knows that when he reads it, it will be informative and helpful. This approach makes it easy for John to associate you as an integration expert with knowledge of his industry. So the next time he needs to find a partner for a new construction project, your company will be the one that comes to mind.
You may not be creating touchpoints for every single customer every month, but what you are doing is providing quality over quantity.
What Impact Can Segmenting Have?
Earlier this month, the free email marketing platform MailChimp released some interesting results from their segmentation research. After studying 11,000 segmented campaigns sent to almost 9 million contacts, MailChimp found that segmented emails performed better than unsegmented emails in every category.
- 14.63% higher open rates
- 94.27% higher click-through rates
- 3.36% lower bounce rates
- 9.36% fewer unsubscribers
Those metrics are pretty incredible, and they go a long way toward answering our initial question: is email segmenting worth it? We think it is, and we’re happy to help your company get started with segmenting and monthly newsletters.
Ready to get more value from your marketing efforts? Contact us today.