It’s no secret that email segmentation can increase the engagement rates of your messages. Nearly 40 percent of marketers who segment their lists saw better open rates, and 24 percent had increased deliverability and ROI on email marketing,
Your prospects and customers are not all the same. Some of them are looking to achieve a specific goal, while others are trying to overcome a particular obstacle.
A portion of your email list might purchase every one of your offers. On the contrary, some prospects will make their first purchase six months after they opted in to your list.
Despite purchase differences, your audience does have one thing in common: They want you to provide them with educational content that moves them closer to their end-state goals.
Why value trumps all
The more value you provide to your email list, the more responsive they will be to your products and services.
So, what exactly is “value,” and how do you create it for your audience?
Value is created whenever you are solving an emotional or painful (physical or mental) problem in your niche and providing increased convenience or efficiency. Remember that the need to avoid pain is greater than the desire to achieve pleasure, a saying a lot of serious marketers attribute to self-help author Tony Robbins.
The content with the highest perceived value solves problems that have a sense of urgency. Take going to the dentist, for example; most of us schedule dentist appointments at least once a year and don’t think much about it.
But imagine if you had a toothache that was causing you an extraordinary amount of pain. I’m willing to bet that when it was time to take out your checkbook, the cost of the treatment would be virtually irrelevant.
This is a perfect opportunity for a dentist to create massive value for his or her customer.
Fortunately, you don’t need to have any medical background to actively solve particular problems in your niche. Some of the emotional pain and problems that your prospects are dealing with can be just as urgent as an unexpected toothache.
Today, I share three segmentation strategies that will help you identify the people who need your products and services the most.
1. Segment by psychographics and demographics
Email segmentation allows you to customize your messages to each of your customer’s needs, which makes your content more relevant and increases the engagement levels of your list.
Create a separate email category for the prevalent psychographics and demographics in your niche.
Demographics
Age
Gender
Geographic location
Psychographics
Goals
Frustrations
Interests
This may require you to do some extensive market research and call some of your customers. Knowing the emotional pain points of your audience or how to make their lives easier is critical to segmenting your list.
If you aren’t garnering the right types of information from the start, then your email sequences will seldom boost sales.
Your segments will most likely vary per niche. Information such as age, gender, geographic location and occupation will likely be more relevant in professional-based “brick-and-mortar” businesses.
For example, someone who owns a chiropractic business is going to be familiar with the behaviors of their clients. The core goals and frustrations of someone experiencing back pain are quite evident. In this particular case, knowing the age, gender and geographic location of customers would be more beneficial to targeted marketing campaigns.
When you determine the segments that are conducive to your niche, it’s time to start gathering data. One of the fastest, most efficient ways to do this is by utilizing surveys.
2. Use surveys to collect relevant data
Surveys are extremely valuable tools in email marketing. When leveraged properly, they will essentially “force” your subscribers to reveal their core goals and frustrations.
Never assume that one of your prospects is going to take the time to fill out a survey for your benefit alone; would you, unless you had some social obligation?
For this reason, you always want to integrate your surveys into your lead magnet (i.e., the call to action to acquire contact information) and product funnels.
Let’s assume you send out a general broadcast message to your list that asks them to complete a survey. From the perspective of your prospect, a survey doesn’t move them closer to the benefits they are looking to experience.
If you aren’t providing value to your subscribers, it’s going to be difficult to get them to take a particular action. As a result, you won’t likely get a high response rate.
For our second example, let’s imagine someone has just landed on your squeeze page. They are excited to get access to your lead magnet offer and have just entered their email address into the web form. Before your prospect gets directed to a thank-you page, a survey is presented to them.
Within the survey, you ask three to four succinct questions about their goals and interests and other pertinent information that applies to your value proposition.
When the survey is a mandatory step to accessing a benefit, completing it is tied to a tangible value. As a result, it will drastically increase your conversion rates.
Collecting enough survey data will allow you to segment your messages and can serve as the foundation of your marketing campaigns. When you know the specific problems that your prospects are looking to overcome, your content becomes immediately more valuable.
3. Tailor your messages towards your segments
As you continue to collect surveys, you’ll want to start tailoring your emails towards each of your segments. Your educational emails and offers should appeal to the psychographics and demographics of each category.
Fortunately, this doesn’t take as much effort as you might imagine. Making simple tweaks to the language of your subject lines and body copy can have a profound impact on your sales conversions.
Let’s use the fictitious ABC Fitness as an example. Assume the average age of their subscribers is between 30 and 60 years old. Their primary goals are weight loss, building lean muscle and improving their cardio endurance.
Based on this information, ABC Fitness has segmented their content into three categories:
Men who are between the ages of 40 and 50 who want to build lean muscle
Women between the ages of 45 and 60 who want to lose weight
Men between the ages of 30 and 40 who want to improve their cardio endurance
Now let’s assume that ABC Fitness is promoting their “Fat Loss 101” e-book. Instead of sending out an email blast with the subject line, “How To Lose Fat Fast,” they can create a customized message for each segment:
5 Tips For Men Looking To Build Lean Defined Muscle
Simple Weight Loss Strategies For Women Over 40
How To Boost Your Cardio For Maximum Fat Loss
The first subject line excludes women and focuses on the benefit of their first segment, men. The second mentions weight loss and addresses the exact age and gender of their female segment. The last subject line is a bit more general, but it still emphasizes the core benefits of their third segment, those looking to improve cardio.
A message that targets a specific segment will yield far more revenue than a general “one size fits all” email sent to an entire list. You can take this a step further by modifying the opening sentence, body copy and calls to action of your emails.
Wrapping up
Take the time to assess the various psychographics and demographics of your list. Entice your subscribers to fill out surveys by using them in conjunction with your lead magnets and products.
Last and most importantly, customize your message to each targeted segment; this is an almost surefire method for delivering massive value and garnering the trust of your email list.
If you implement these three strategies into your marketing campaigns, you should see a noticeable increase in your leads and sales conversions.
Take as many swings as possible to help your prospects overcome their problems, fears and so on. The more relevant communication you can provide, the more likely it is that they will become long-term customers.
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