What’s the one thing you can do to understand your email subscribers better and make your list more profitable? Well, it’s segmentation of course!

Segmentation is the email marketing trick that we all know we should be doing but we aren’t all doing it nearly as well as we could be, which means people are falling through the cracks and receiving irrelevant emails, which means one thing – they lose interest!

You might be thinking that segmenting your email subscribers is complicated and time-consuming, but we’ve got a few techniques to share with you that will make it a doddle…

Email Subscriber Segmentation – The Concept

Let’s start with something really basic, but it covers the overall concept of segmentation.

If you’ve got a bunch of different products or services that you sell and someone goes ahead and buys one of those things, you’re unlikely to email them ever again about the exact same thing they just bought.

Whenever someone buys something from you, you should be segmenting them based on the fact that they’ve bought something. Whether that’ applying a tag or adding them to another list, you should have a way of excluding that email subscriber from receiving future emails about whatever it is they already purchased from you.

The general idea is that you should be able to put in place a process for segmenting your email subscribers based on their actions so that you’re better equipped to include in relevant emails and exclude them from those pesky irrelevant ones.

6 Techniques To Segment Your Email Subscribers

Product Or Service
Whenever someone buys something from you, you want to segment them with tags based on what that product is. This can usually be done nice and easily by integrating your shopping cart with your email marketing system – boom!

Related Interests
You might also want to segment your email subscribers based on their related interests, so they’ve bought one product or service from you which will give you a pretty good idea of what they're interested in. You can go ahead and tag them based on those interests so that you can follow up with related products and top-notch content.

What’s The Problem?
Just because your email subscribers might all be in the same niche, doesn’t mean they all have the same problems, pains, and desires. Each subscriber will have their own unique reason for needing your help and you should be using that to segment them and offer them the best advice, content, and products for their specific problems.

Stage Of Business
It’s so important that you segment people based on the stage they’re at in their business. They could be anywhere between raising initial business funds through to running a successful profitable business. You can ask them a set of questions designed to find out exactly what stage of business they are in, or what stage in the customer journey they’re at.

Link Clicks
When you send out a link in an email and someone clicks that link, that should be a signal to you that this person is interested, they like what you’re putting out there, and they want to find out more. That’s a pretty big indicator that they’re further along the journey than other email subscribers might be, and you should segment them based on that. Pop a tag on them and work your magic!

Demographics
Depending on your niche, demographics could be an incredibly effective way to segment your list. The products and services you’re promoting and selling will differ based on someone’s gender, age, location, etc, so having your audience tagged and segmented based on demographics is going to make life easy breezy for you.

Subject Line Of The Week

This week's subject line comes from Scott Oldford and we're loving it because…

Listeners Question

What is the best type of email follow up sequence to use for new subscribers?

Kim Doyal, kimdoyal.com

Kennedy: I think it’s become a bit of a trend that when people opt-in for a low value or low price point offer, they go through a series of upsells, an ascension ladder of products and services that increase in price and value. I prefer to break the mold and actually focus on building a relationship and proving value first by forcing consumption. This sequence encourages people to consume the product that they’ve already downloaded or purchased, it’s a nice surprise when someone expects to be sold at and instead, you’re building trust and value with them.

Rob: Do something that allows you to find out more about what that new subscriber wants and needs. Rather than immediately selling them the next thing that you think they want, actually find out what they need and want and promote that instead. It just makes sense, right?

If you have an email marketing question you would love us to answer you can submit it right here.