Email Segmentation & Subscriber Growth Strategies

Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting your online venture, the power of email marketing cannot be overstated. Email marketing remains a powerful form of marketing in which you have direct communication with your audience. It’s a powerful tool to use throughout the marketing funnel from leading to conversions to retention. There are 4 billion daily email users. Let’s repeat that one more time for the back, 4 BILLION. That’s a lot of potential. 

However, it’s not just about growing a large list; it’s about developing a list that’s engaged, responsive, and tailored to your audience’s needs. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the art and science of growing your email list and segmenting it effectively for maximum impact. 

What is an email list? 

An email list is a collection of addresses that have submitted their emails and opted into receiving content or updates from your company via email. But how do you build your list? 

Building your email list

Whether you’re starting from scratch or want to increase the size of your list, there are several avenues you can take to add more contacts to your list. 

On Your Website

A simple way to passively increase your email list is by adding a field onto your website where people can input their email addresses to stay up to date on anything your business is putting out. 

Add an opt-in link to your signature

This is another passive way of growing your email list – anyone who gets emails from you can easily opt into joining your email list with ease. 

Create a Lead Gen

Creating a gated lead-generation campaign is a great way to gather email contacts. To do this, create a landing page that asks visitors to input their email addresses in exchange for something. This could be for a free ebook or video or even access to a webinar or something else that provides them with value. You can then promote this landing page via organic means such as social media or with paid means like advertising. This is a great way to gather emails of people who you know are interested in a specific topic that you can then nurture. 

Post snippets of your newsletter on social

Another way to entice people to provide you with their emails for email communication is by posting impactful snippets of your newsletter’s content on your social media channels and letting them know that to get access to the rest of the newsletter and every newsletter after they sign up. 

Membership or Reward Sign-up Options

This could be at check-out and could be highly effective if you create a reward or membership program that provides them an incentive to sign up. Allow them to get a percentage off their next purchase plus other exclusive deals in exchange for their email, this is a more transaction-based reason for signing up. 

Once you gather additional email contacts, whether it’s from a lead generation, membership program, or simply off your website you will want to implement email list segmentation. 

What is Segmentation? 

Segmentation, simply put, is the practice of dividing your email list into different categories. This division allows you to group your contacts on a variety of metrics such as demographics, buying behavior, engagement, sign-up source, etc. There are a wide variety of ways that you can segment your email contact lists but the goal of it is to allow you to send even more personalized emails to each segment. 

Benefits of segmentation

Segmentation ensures that the right emails get to the right audiences and in turn it has a lot of effects including but not limited to the: 

Increased open rate

How many times have you deleted an email before even opening it? The likelihood of you opening an email if it is tailored towards you is much higher than if you get an email that’s targeted towards a different audience segment than that which you are in. Having segmented email lists allows you to send out content that is more relevant to each audience which in turn should increase open rates. 

Increased click-through rates

Once you get the users to open the email, you’re more likely to get them to click if the contents of the email are related to them and paired with strong CTAs. 

Decreases unsubscribe rates

People are less likely to unsubscribe if the content they receive via email is relevant to them or their behaviors. Therefore, if you segment your lists and tailor each email to be more personalized and effective towards each segment you should see fewer unsubscribes occurring.

Now that you know some methods of increasing your email list as well as have some ideas of the benefits of segmenting your list, let’s discuss the different ways you could potentially segment your contacts. 

Ways to segment your email audience

Segmenting your email list can take a variety of different forms, determining which is the best option for you depends on your business, as well as your prospective email campaigns. So let’s talk about how you could think about segmenting the list – and remember, different email platforms such as Mailchimp allow you to add different tags to each email contact so that you can pull them into multiple different segments as needed. 

Demographics

Segment your email audiences by a variety of demographics such as gender, location, and more – this will allow you to send out a variety of more targeted emails for different audiences. For example, you could send regional sales emails. Another way that demographics could be used is for jewelry stores to send out emails to males around the holidays for gifts for that special someone they are looking for a gift for.

Buying behavior

This can be split in a variety of ways for example one way you can segment buying behavior is by basing it on spending. This way you can send a discount email to those who are more likely to shop using coupons/bargains vs those who are dedicated to purchasing the newest releases. 

Customer Journey

This could mean a variety of things, for example, if you are a new client or customer you may receive different communications or be put into an onboarding or welcome automation versus when you are a returning customer you may receive more specialized emails for news and deals.

B2B vs B2C 

This is an important distinction to keep in mind as several businesses will have both pieces in their email lists. Whether it’s partnerships or clients the way you communicate to a B2B customer or partner is different from B2C. In the non-profit space, this is also important as you may be communicating B2C with those who are involved in the programs but then B2B would be the communications asking for donations and partnerships for events or the organization as  a whole.

Email Engagement

You can segment those who are not engaging with your emails into a group to launch a re-engagement campaign to attempt to see if they either still want to be on the list, or if you can get them to become more active. 

This may sound great but the question of how you find out this data is still kicking around. 

How to begin segmentation

It’s important to note that you cannot build segments without data. If you have the data already available you are ahead of the game, if you don’t – not to worry – start thinking of what information you want and determine ways you can collect that data. 

A lot of the data may already be available to you from other analytics tools of your business; for example, purchase behavior data is most likely already tracked by your business. Similarly, email engagement is oftentimes tracked by your CMS, if you are using a platform like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. If you want to determine some specific data, you can survey your audience to get additional insights – however, you have to be conscious that not everyone will answer it.

Conclusion

In the world of digital marketing, your email list is a goldmine waiting to be tapped. But it’s not enough to simply amass a list of subscribers; you must also segment and nurture your list to drive meaningful engagement and conversions. By implementing the strategies outlined in this post, you can cultivate a loyal audience that eagerly anticipates your emails and takes action on your offers. Remember, the key to success lies in understanding your audience, delivering relevant content, and continually optimizing your email marketing efforts. So go ahead, start growing your list with purpose, and watch as your business flourishes with every targeted email you send.