TL;DR: Tailor emails to specific segments based on demographics, purchase history, or engagement levels to make your campaigns more relevant, boost conversion rates, and reduce unsubscribes.
Introduction
Email list segmentation is a powerful strategy that involves organizing your contacts into smaller, more targeted groups based on shared characteristics or specific information. By dividing your overall subscriber list into segments, you can tailor your messaging to be more relevant and engaging. This approach not only enhances the effectiveness of your email campaigns, but also helps maintain a strong, engaged relationship with your audience.
What is Contact Segmentation?
Email list segmentation is the practice of separating your overall list of subscribers into smaller, targeted groups– like groups based on industry, location, area of known interest, etc. to be able to target more relevant messaging.Â
If you are a nonprofit organization who specifically wants volunteer signups to fill last-minute gaps for an upcoming event, you may want to only email your known volunteers (and not your donor base, for instance). Or if you are a healthcare organization communicating about upcoming changes to your senior care capabilities, you may want to target only subscribers in a certain age group. The strategy of segmentation saves other subscribers on your list from getting irrelevant information that may drive them to disengage from your communications.Â
Why You Should Segment Your Email List
Contact segmentation is like choosing the perfect gift for your subscribers. For example, if you run a grocery store and offer a Cheese of the Month promotion, all sign-ups go into a general list. However, sending a cheese promotion to a lactose-intolerant customer, while well-intentioned, misses the mark. They'd prefer content tailored to their interests.
Instead, imagine when customers sign up, they are given a few different list options to join. One of those lists might be the Cheese of the Month Club, but another might be for the in-house coffee shop. Now, this customer can select a list that represents something relevant to them and receive Café Rewards. This is the magic of segmentation.
When you deliver relevant content to the right lists and segments, they’re more likely to engage. This fosters excitement and inspiration, making them eager to interact–not only boosting brand awareness but also driving more clicks.
How to Segment Your Email List Effectively
Collect information. Set up sign-up landing pages or surveys to collect information from your audience. This helps you create the content they want. Let’s go back to the grocery store example. You’ll want to create a sign-up landing page and make sure you have multiple lists available for prospective contacts to choose from that relate to their interests. With a Cheese of the Month Club or Café Rewards, you can create a QR code that leads customers to the landing page and leave a scannable version at the register for customers when they’re checking out.
Identify who you are talking to. Look at your email list and break it down into smaller groups. This could be based on behavior (are they engaged or not?), shopping or donation habits, product or service offerings, geographic location, or interest. You can enable click segmentation when creating a text link, button, or clickable image in an email. Let’s say the grocery store puts in a link about the latest offerings in the bakery section as part of their general monthly newsletter. If someone clicks on that link, you could determine that they are specifically interested in baked goods and automatically tag them and add their email to a list dedicated to the Bakery.
Get personal(ized). Craft emails with personalized content for each group, using different subject lines or dynamic content to address your audience's specific needs and interests. For example, if the grocery store sends a general newsletter, they can use dynamic content to show only relevant sections to each contact. Maybe contacts have a custom field related to preferred food, drinks, or sections of the grocery store and you only want the section about the latest coffee flavor to be seen by people with “Café” listed in the field.
Segmentation Toolbelt
Now that we have a better understanding of segmentation and the strategies behind doing so, it’s time to saddle up and take a look at the tools we have to segment your contacts efficiently. Use the ones that make the most sense for your contacts!Â
Lists: Lists are groups of contacts associated with a specific theme. You can create a single list and add all your contacts to it, or create multiple lists to organize your audience.
Tags: Tags are simple labels you can add to your contacts. They act as a filter when you send an email. You might want to send an email to multiple lists, but only to specific contacts on each of those lists, or alternatively, you don’t want contacts with a specific tag to receive the email.Â
Segments: Segments are the result of dividing a large group of contacts into smaller, targeted clusters based on common interests, traits, or behaviors—similar to lists, but with a key difference in how they're created. While lists are manually curated by you, segments are dynamically generated by selecting one or multiple criteria. We can then identify and sort the relevant contacts into new groups. These segments can be added to existing lists, or they can stand alone.
Harness your creativityÂ
Sticking with our grocery store example, the store might have one general list for non-specific communications, but separate lists for different themes, such as contacts that only want to receive communications about café updates or bakery updates. When you go to send an email, you can select the list(s) most relevant to the contents of the campaign. The grocery store might have a loyalty program and want to offer a blanket discount for 10% off anything in the store, so they would select multiple lists (e.g. Bakery and Café) and then choose to narrow by the Loyalty tag so only Loyalty members on the Bakery and Café lists will receive the promotion. A grocery store sends an email with a variety of links to different food items, both regular and organic. They use click segmentation to identify which customers click on the organic items and create a new segment based on that criteria.
Here are some common segments that small businesses use to help personalize their outreach:
 Location
Job Title
Industry
Age
Household information
Gender
Home ownership
Income
Education level
Length of relationship with your organization
Amount spent or donated
Devices used
Engagement level
Products or services purchased
Referral sources
Pro Tip: It's especially important if you're running an eCommerce business to integrate segmentation with your online store (such as Shopify) so you can better identify your most loyal customers or follow up with them if they abandoned their online shopping cart.
