It’s often said that email is a high ROI channel. Various studies will tell you that for every $1 you put in, you can get around $45 in return. That’s often achieved by getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time — and that’s achieved by segmenting your audience so they get the right content.
This obviously leads to more work — It’s a bit of an industry secret — but most of the gains are in the easy wins, then there’s a very long tail to squeeze value out of after. That means you can get a lot of value out of segmenting a few things (but I didn’t tell you that).
If you’re just getting started, here are some common ways people segment their audiences:
An easy one here is if people are a member of your loyalty club. There might be more granularity if your loyalty club has different levels. People who are loyal to your brand deserve something nice, and a bit of recognition. Make them feel good. Conversely - if people aren’t a member, you might want to nudge them to sign up.
Often your sending tool will give you some kind of engagement score for individual users, and you can use this to tailor your messaging - how would you change your message for people who purchase every week vs. every so often vs. only once vs. not at all (yet)? Do people who haven’t yet purchased need a helping hand?
Do you have a message that is only relevant for people in one area? Are offers only available at a local store? This can also scale out to region and country, which leads to changing content by language, currency, sending people to a different local website etc.
There might be some things that you sell that females buy more than males, older people more than younger people — and vice versa, but use caution — this isn’t as binary as you might think. Not least, some people might be buying gifts for other people. Remember it’s 2020 not 1920.
Personalisation is more than saying “hello Firstname” but that is often a good start. Think about what other useful data you can pull through, but also be careful about sensitive data falling into the wrong hands (even something innocuous like a customer ID could be used to phish an account, if the email ends up in the wrong place).