Lists in Check, Segments in Sync
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the final week of the Ready, Set, Send Challenge!
Over the past few weeks, you’ve learned the ins and outs of goal setting, designing the perfect email, audience building, multi-channel campaigns and reporting. Now it’s time to grab one last tool to add to your belt. The best part? You’ll get bragging rights to tell all your friends that you’re officially a master of marketing. All jokes aside, your hard work over the past few weeks has been incredible to see. This week, we’ll dive into the nitty gritty and start cleaning. We’re organizing your contacts with segmentation so you can increase engagement! This strategy will help you dramatically improve your email campaigns.
I’m David Fischer, the founder of Solutions for Growth, one of the country’s largest Solution Providers of Constant Contact. For over 14 years we’ve managed thousands of email campaigns and supported hundreds of small businesses, so I think we know a thing or two about email marketing! 🙂
Have you been sending the same email to all your contacts? Imagine how much more effective your campaigns could be if you tailor your email content to specific segments, whether these segments are based on demographics, purchase history, or engagement levels; by understanding your subscribers' preferences and behaviors, you can offer more relevant messages, improve conversion rates and reduce unsubscribes. Let’s dive in and finish this 6-week challenge to become the ultimate marketing warriors!
What is Contact Segmentation?
Segmentation is the process of organizing your contacts into smaller, more targeted groups based on shared characteristics or information.
Why You Should Segment Your Email List
Contact segmentation is like selecting the ideal gift for your subscribers. Pretend, for a moment, you operate a grocery store and you incentivize sign-ups from customers. As part of your marketing efforts, you run a Cheese of the Month Club promotion. When customers sign up, they're all dropped in a general list of contacts. Now, one of your customers receives the Cheese of the Month promotion, but they're lactose intolerant. Sure, it's well-intentioned, but it leaves the customer wanting more catered content for what they’re interested in.
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.
- For example: As a grocery store, 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. Let’s say there’s 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.
- For example: 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 based on the groups you identified. Use different subject lines, or leverage dynamic content to speak directly to your audience’s needs and interests.
- For example: If the grocery store sends a general newsletter, but still wants to curate what recipients might see based on their contact details, they can use dynamic content to only show certain sections of the email to certain contacts. 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
It’s time to saddle up and take a look at the tools we have to segment your contacts efficiently. Let’s use the ones that make the most sense for your contacts!
- 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.
- For example: A grocery 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.
- 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.
- For example: 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.
- 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.
- For example: 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.
It’s a Numbers Game
Once segments are created and sent, look at your data for click and unsubscribe rates after each send. This helps you determine if your email was successful or if you need to switch things up. You can see how well your campaign performed now that it's catered to the right audiences.
Let’s say you didn’t capture additional data about your contacts– did you know that you can use their engagement with your emails to do a segmentation campaign? Most plans with Constant Contact have built-in engagement segments where the system automatically sorts your contacts into most engaged, somewhat engaged and least engaged.
By strategically segmenting your contacts, you can craft more engaging and targeted email campaigns that boost your chances of achieving your marketing goals (think back to Week 1!). So, let’s get to work and start building out your segments and watch your email marketing ROI soar!
Resources:
- Handout: Segmentation ideas
- Blog: How to Collect Data for Email Marketing Segmentation
- Community: List Management Practices
- Worksheet: Email List Segmentation
Assignment:
- Review your current lists. How many lists do you have? Are you already using segmentation? Do you have tags? Identify areas of opportunity.
- Review your click and open rate data so you get in the habit of checking on your progress! Can you identify opportunities to segment contacts based on the links they've clicked or which contacts have opened your emails the most lately?
- Complete the Email List Segmentation worksheet.
How you’ll earn your badge
- Complete the Email List Segmentation worksheet and reply below with a screenshot and also let us know what’s working best for you!
TL;DR
This week’s focus is on email list segmentation to improve engagement and ROI. Create targeted groups based on your audience's data and personalize your emails for better results. Track your performance with clicks and unsubscribes. Complete the worksheet and share a screenshot to earn your badge!
David Fischer Solutions For Growth Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. |  |
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I am not sure how a list like this can evolve as people age. I guess I could use click segmentation to assume their age based on the programs they click on, but that wouldn't be the most accurate and would only work for people who click links.
@user386358 age is a great way to segment, and yes, it can be derived by other actions people take. Once you know that, as you indicate in the third column, your messaging can be customized for them. Consider creating a birthday contest, where people enter by giving their birthday, and the winner gets something of value, like a discount on tuition. I hope this helps.
We've been managing email programs for client for the past 14 years, and are one of the country's largest Constant Contact Solution Providers - perhaps we help you!
David Fischer Solutions For Growth Help others find this post by giving it kudos. Note: I am not a Constant Contact employee. | |
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We have over 125 lists broken up into industries and certain Vendors. We created the following segments that will help send to these lists more efficiently. The only problem is that we have over 30 lists just for the Automotive Industry for our vendors, so we have to break up the segment list into three places. I wish you could have at least 30 lists in a segment, not just 10. We tried to start using tags when people open our emails, but we are not consistent with it yet.
Given that we are a nonprofit organization helping economic growth in the area, it is not really in our interest to segment this as if we are selling a product and are trying to advertise it to different groups of people. That being said, here is the information that we gather.
Thanks for sharing @JenniferS7! With more than 125 lists, including 30 just for cars, it shows that you're working hard to handle different groups for reaching out to specific industries. Keep up the good work!
Regarding the segmentation limit, I understand how the cap of 10 lists per segment could be limiting, especially when working with such a large dataset. While it may currently require breaking up your lists into multiple segments, I’ll be sure to pass along your feedback to our development team to consider increasing this limit in the future. In the meantime, you might try using sub-categories within each list where possible, as a way to streamline and organize them more effectively, even if it's within the existing constraints.
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This was, by far, the hardest challenge for me. We deal in resale clothing and accessories. Everything is regularly unique. We put on a bunch of sales and events and thought guests could be segmented into which events they like or don't. We have been in business over 20 years and our email list is large. I'm not aware how it could be retroactively segmented or if I'd have to start from scratch. This is definitely something I will have to continue to think about and decide how to implement. Week 6, done. 
We have LOTS of lists (close to 100?) - I know the ones I frequently use are combed through.
I look forward to seeing how segmentation works and tags. We have Google Forms for interests, but having it on CC will be a nice one-stop-shop where we can edit/verify the lists instead of *constantly* asking each program year - I feel most peoples interests are pretty consistent. It also will be helpful to be able to share those names with event leaders looking for volunteers going forward.
I HOPE I STILL GET MY BADGE! - I had a very jam packed week.
Ask and you shall receive 😉
Elevate your marketing with Constant Contact's Professional Design Services! From eye-catching email templates to custom branding and social media graphics, our professional design services are tailored to boost your business's impact and engagement. | |
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