Your Guide to Email Segmentation: Key Benefits

When it comes to email newsletters, design seems to be the most important aspect - at least at first. While this is key, there’s something more important - your audience!

You could have the most beautiful email design ever created, but if it’s not going to the right people, you’re in trouble. That’s where segmentation comes in. Segmentation will be the answer to your problems when it comes to engagement and open rates for your email newsletter.

Keep reading for our in-depth guide to segmentation in email newsletters, including what it is, why it’s so important, and how you can go about implementing it in your email marketing strategy.

What is Segmentation for Email Newsletters?

Let’s start at the beginning: what is segmentation for email newsletters?

When we talk about segmentation in email marketing, this essentially means dividing up an email list based on certain attributes. These could include demographics, activity (such as whether a subscriber has opened an email previously), or even if they’ve abandoned their shopping cart on your website.

The purpose of this is to tailor your email list and make your email marketing more targeted. More on this later on.

What is the Use of Email Segmentation?

The primary use of email segmentation is to make content more personalized for subscribers. By segmenting an email list, you’re ensuring that your subscribers only receive the most relevant emails to them, and therefore improve the chances of those subscribers engaging.

Many email marketers choose to use segmentation to improve the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of their emails and ultimately make their email campaigns more customized and successful.

Why is Segmenting an Effective Email Marketing Strategy?

There are a few different reasons why segmentation is an effective email marketing strategy. Here are the top reasons for you to bear in mind.

Open Rate

Segmentation can be very successful in improving the open rate of your email newsletters. If you segment your subscriber list and send an email out to a specific group of audience members, the email is likely to appear more personalized and therefore encourage more users to open it.

Here’s an example. You segment your email list by sex and send an email advertising women’s clothing to women only. You’re far more likely to receive better open rates as the email is tailored to women specifically, and your data won’t be muddied by the men on your list, who are less likely to open this email.

CTR

Segmentation can positively impact another key metric in email marketing - Click Through Rate (CTR).

If you include Calls To Action (CTA) in your emails, you’ll find that a segmented email list will likely provide a better CTR to your website, as the email is better tailored to those specific users.

Personalization

Your emails will be significantly more personalized when using email segmentation. This is because segmentation involves dividing up your list and sending specific emails to different audiences, giving subscribers a more customized experience. Compare this with a blanket approach, whereby subscribers would receive all emails sent from your business, with no customization - it’s easy to see which is likely to be better.

Your audience is likely to feel more valued if sent an email via a segmented list, as they’re receiving more relevant emails from your brand. They’ll also be more likely to engage and have a positive experience with your company.

Conversion Rate

Arguably the most important metric when it comes to email marketing is conversion rate - why send an email if you don’t ultimately have a goal in mind?

Segmenting email lists does wonders for your conversion rate, as your email will only be received by subscribers that will find it relevant. Your audience will enjoy this personalized approach and will be more likely to convert. Plus, you’re removing subscribers that won’t be interested, and would ultimately decrease your conversion rate.

Organization

Another key benefit of segmentation is improved organization. Your subscriber lists will become more organized with segmentation, and you’ll find your email marketing activities will become more efficient.

You can even set up dynamic segmentation, which means your lists will update automatically - more to come on this later!

How Do I Segment a Newsletter Subscriber?

Now you know what segmentation in email newsletters is and the benefits it provides. So how do you go about segmenting a newsletter subscriber?

Here’s a quick walk-through guide to segmentation using beehiiv!

1. The first step is to open up beehiiv and click the Audience section on the left-hand side. This will provide a drop-down list; you’ll need to select Segmentation here.

2. Click Create Segment

3. Give your segment a name, and choose whether you wish it to be Static (generated once), Dynamic (regenerated daily), or Manual (uploaded by CSV).

4. Select conditions from the dropdown options. These could include Attributes, Measures, Email Actions, or Groups. Once you’re happy, click Create Segment.

Your segment will take a little time to process depending on the size of the list. Once it’s ready, you can use it as an audience when sending out emails!

What is the Best Way to Segment Email Lists?

There are many different ways in which you can segment your email list, each with different purposes/goals. Here are a few of the best ways to segment email lists to get results in your email marketing:

Demographic

Segmenting audiences by demographic is a popular way of using segmentation. This enables you to segment subscribers by their individual attributes and provide emails that are tailored to specific audiences.

This could include segmenting your audience by age, sex, nationality, or occupation. Demographic targeting is perfect if you want to target subscribers in a specific city for example, or perhaps people over the age of 25.

User Behavior

You can segment your audience by user behavior to improve KPIs such as conversion rate. If a subscriber displays favorable behavior when using your website or reading your emails, this would make them a good candidate for a segmented list, as you know that you’re likely to receive good engagement from them again.

User behavior, such as CTR or time spent on your website, could be used as segments, or even as good open rates on previous emails.

Polls

Using polls/surveys are effective ways to segment your email lists. This involves sending your wider audience a poll with a few questions, and segmenting your list by the answers that they choose. This enables you to determine key facts about your subscribers, and ensures you’re sending them relevant emails moving forward.

Here’s an example. You set up a poll that asks which type of email content your subscribers prefer; e.g. Marketing Content, Videos, Case Studies, etc. You could then segment your lists based on these answers and avoid sending them content they’d rather not receive in the future.

Position in Sales Funnel

Segmenting users based on their position in the sales funnel is a highly popular segmentation technique, as it’s been proven time and time again to improve conversion rate.

For example, a customer has been on your website for a while and has added numerous items to their shopping cart. Unfortunately, they’ve abandoned their session and have forgotten to check out their items! Segmentation allows you to target these users and remind them to come back to purchase their items.

Previous Customers

Our final recommended segmentation technique is segmenting your email lists by existing customers. If audience members have already purchased from you, these could be considered ‘warm’ subscribers who may be likely to purchase from you again in the future.

These audience members already know your brand and have bought into what your company is about. This could also be a good opportunity to reward subscribers for their loyalty and give them a little something extra that only existing customers receive, such as discount codes or early access to upcoming promotions.

What Is the Most Powerful Benefit of Segmentation in Email Marketing?

The most powerful benefit of segmentation in email marketing is, ultimately, ensuring a more targeted approach–resulting in more sales/conversions for your brand. The more customized the strategy, the more likely you will be to succeed with your email newsletters.

While it may seem that you’re emailing a lot fewer people, these audiences will be more likely to engage, and you should see improved results by using email segmentation.

What Are 5 Elements of an Effective Newsletter?

So now that you know about email segmentation and how to implement it, how can you create the perfect email? Here are five elements to keep in mind to create an effective newsletter:

Compelling Subject Line

Make a great first impression with a compelling subject line to ensure that subscribers are opening your emails in the first place. As the subject line is the first element of your email that your audience will see, it’s important to catch the reader’s attention and encourage them to want to know more.

Compelling subject lines could ask a question or imply that there’s something exciting inside the email. Make sure to keep your subject line short and sweet. You could always carry out A/B testing to determine the best subject lines - check out our blog for tips on how this works!

Design

The design of your email is super important. If your email isn’t well-designed, it can look unprofessional. This sets a bad impression from the start - no one wants that.

Use high-quality graphics and videos in your email newsletters to engage your subscribers, and ensure that your email is mobile-friendly. More on this over on our blog!

CTAs

CTAs are super important when creating an effective email campaign. If you don’t direct users to a primary goal, there’s not much point in emailing them, bar exposure.

Once you’ve established the main goal of your email, think of a CTA that would be appropriate for your newsletter. This could be ‘Start A Free Trial’ for example, or ‘Book An Appointment’. Make sure that your CTA is clearly visible and that you’re tracking this data via tracking codes/Google Analytics. You can segment this data later and use it for remarketing!

Audience

As we’ve discussed in this guide, your audience is one of the most important elements when it comes to creating a successful email campaign. If your audience is interested in your brand, they’re more likely to engage and complete the CTAs that you’ve implemented.

Segment your audiences thoroughly, and test out different email campaigns to ensure that your emails are relevant to your subscribers. This will improve your campaign metrics and keep your audience involved with your brand.

Content

Last, but by no means least, is the content of your email. While they may just seem like words on a page, email copy is vastly important when it comes to getting into the details of what your emails are about–and content can either make or break an email campaign.

Keep your content short and sweet, avoiding lengthy content as much as possible. Ensure that your font is an appropriate size and is easily readable on a range of devices.

Conclusion

There we have it - everything you need to know about the benefits of email segmentation and how to implement it! You should now be a segmentation guru, raring to go with your next email campaign.

To start moving on your email segmentation strategy, sign up for a free trial with beehiiv! You can create up to three audience segments with our free Launch plan, which is a great place to start while you’re experimenting with segmented email lists for your business.

Once you’ve got the hang of this, you’ll likely find our Grow plan useful, as this provides you with unlimited audience segmentation. Check out the pricing page on our website to see a full list of our plans.