If your online email list for your eCommerce business has been struggling to create engagement from your mailing list, there are multiple things that need to be taken into account. You need to make sure that you are properly marketing to each individual demographic within your email marketing list. Remember, not every subscriber on your email marketing list is made equal. Each person represents a different value level that will be completely dependent upon the amount of money that they could potentially spend with you. Every demographic needs to be marketed differently, depending upon their needs, wants, and your products.
Take into account that different individuals on your email marketing list may be interested in different items. For instance, if you ran a clothing store, you likely would not want to market large sales on women’s clothing to men. The same could be true for the opposite as well. Instead, you may want to segment your email marketing list so that you can be certain that you are sending the correct marketing materials to the individuals that will be interested in the products that you are advertising. Take the following tips and tricks into account when you are looking at how to go about segmenting an already existing email marketing list;
Start By Customer Type
The most simplistic way to begin segmenting an email marketing list is to separate by customer type. A good way to do this is to evaluate when they join, and look at the number of purchases that they have made from you. Perhaps you would have one type of customer that signed up for your website, but never made a purchase. You would want to keep those customers separate from individuals that have made a wide number of purchases from your website. Perhaps another customer type that you would like to segment out from the general population is individuals that made a single purchase from your website, but have not made a second purchase.
Depending upon the software that you will be using to manage your email marketing lists, there may be certain customer type labels that are already built into the program. If not, you may have to manually segment your email list to the best of your ability. This will help you to ensure that you can custom craft the right marketing materials for the right individuals, and make sure that you are not sending materials to your entire list, that would typically only be used for a small subsection of your list of subscribers. Knowing how to market to first-time customers, loyal customers, and interested parties will help you to send marketing materials that create engagement.
Interests
Another excellent idea is to segment your list based on a number of interests. For instance, if you ran a sports website, you would likely want to market different types of sporting goods to individuals that actually play that sport. You would not want to market tennis rackets to someone that had only made basketball related purchases on your website. This may require you to collect additional information from your subscribers, in order to get a better idea of exactly what kind of products they may be interested in purchasing. Interest-based segmented lists can be a great help, especially when deciding which product you would like to market to whom. Sending an ad based on specific interests will make them much more likely to engage with your marketing emails.
An easy way to know what materials to market to your list is to keep an idea of the different items that they purchase. By keeping this information, you will be able to market related products to them, through your segmented lists. Determine how you are going to go about segmenting your list, based on the previously purchased products, and craft specific marketing lead-ins for that particular product, increasing engagement, return on investment, and potentially holding onto subscribers for a longer period of time.
Locations
One excellent method for segmenting your list is based on location, particularly when the products that you offer are going to be relatively location dependent. For instance, if you were going to be offering a deal on shipping, you want to make sure that you are only marketing this deal to individuals that are going to qualify for it. For instance, if individuals that you are marketing live in a completely different country from your shipping site, they may not qualify for the shipping deal that you are offering and you should attempt to remove them from your mailing list for that particular deal. Not only does segmenting your email list allow you to increase engagement, it allows you to lessen confusion among your customers as well.
Activity Based
Another less-used method for segmenting your email list is based on the level of engagement. You can actually tailor messages to individuals based on the amount that they have engaged with your company in the past. Perhaps you have a promotion that is only going to be billed for individuals that have utilized your website multiple times, and you would like to remove new users from your database.
Segmenting out the inactive subscribers is a great way to make sure that you are not wasting resources. The strategy is an interesting one that continues to yield results for eCommerce websites across the web. By segmenting subscribers that never open your emails within a certain time-frame; you can tailor your best deals and discounts to individuals that are more likely to engage with your marketing materials. Activity-based segmentation is a relatively new concept for many businesses, but is one that can yield excellent results if you are willing to take the time to craft specific marketing materials for different levels of activity.