Achieving Better Performance with Email Segmentation & Personalization [Video]

Your customers are complex beings. Treating them like one giant uniform crowd is not good for you or your subscribers because it limits messaging and lowers relevancy. Tailored messaging, at least some of the time, is vital.

While we talk a lot about one-to-one messaging in this industry, the one-to-some messaging that segmentation provides can boost relevancy, engagement, and ROI significantly. The trick is identifying the right segments. Some will be long-term segments that are tightly linked to customer personas, while others are of-the-moment segments that seize a fleeting opportunity.

Jen Rhee, Email Marketing Manager at online learning marketplace Udemy, knows a lot about segmentation and how it can power email marketing success. At The Email Design Conference, I was able to interview Jen about how marketers can make the most of email segmentation.

You can watch the full interview here, or read a transcript of it below.

There’s three different ways that I like to look at segmentation beyond demographics. The first is behavior, and that’s really what your customer is doing. What actions are they taking that are going to likely lead to a conversion? The second is engagement. So how are they interacting with your product or company? The third is psychographics, and that’s the trickiest one, but it’s really, Why did they first end up with you in the first place?

There’s thousands of different ways you can create segments. You can come up with lots of different segments. It’s really important that you focus on the right ones, because we all have limited time and resources. So you want to look at which chunk of your users are generating the most profit, because it’s likely that a small percent of your users are very loyal customers. And focusing on them is going to give you the biggest return in the quickest way possible.

I think that email is the most valuable channel because you have all this customer data that you can use to personalize your emails, so you can maintain that customer relationship. Out of all the other different marketing channels that I worked on, none of them can be as customizable as email. And you’re maintaining that relationship with email, so it’s super important, and you have to make sure that that message is so relevant to your customer.