As July nears its end, are the sales reports for your store disappointing?
Maybe you should send another email to your list.
You’ve already thought of that.
But who on your list wants to receive another email now? Who will even engage?
When in doubt, someone on the team presses the ‘send’ button to just about everyone on the list. The more recipients, the more chances someone will place an ecom order.
Sometimes this means customers who just placed an order are asked to buy something, again. Now there’s an email waiting for your team with a pissed off customer asking for a refund. Ugh.
Have you seen this happen before?
A targeted segment within your list is powerful
Sending to everyone causes more problems than it solves. Besides the poor customer experience, your deliverability to the inbox suffers.
Most brands don’t segment their emails or SMS messages. It can feel like an aspirational best practice.
You need more sales now. So it’s common for marketers to defer segmentation for later. We tell ourselves we’ll do it when there’s more time to figure it out, and less urgency for results.
You’re not alone if the sales pressure to reach all your “active” people overpowers the desire to make emails more relevant to specific segments of your list.
Today I’m sharing one tactic to help you segment your emails more consistently with a “minimum viable” strategy.
So best case scenario, suppose you segment based on observed interests or past purchases. Then you overlay criteria for a cross-sell opportunity. For an apparel brand, maybe it’s people interested in pants and who you want to buy your bestselling tee.
Sounds like a best practice in action. Nice idea, hmm…
But if your ‘active’ list is 5X larger than this new segment, there’s some tension. Which path to choose?
How do you decide which segments of your list get all your email campaigns, and which ones only get an email every 3 months or so? What about your SMS campaigns?
Finding this balance is how you keep unsubscribe rates low and content relevance high, with your subscribers sufficiently engaged to support a healthy sender reputation.
The size of your list and the capacity of your team make all the difference.
At some point, there are diminishing returns on highly targeted segments. Especially if your list has less than 20k people, and 10k or less are customers.
I see this ratio all the time, across a variety of brand niches. Similar dynamics show up in lists that are 50-100k+ also.
So if you don’t have one person on your team that’s 100% dedicated to email, there are constraints on how much effort you can put towards segmenting. Some brands solve this by hiring an agency to help.
Others do what they can on their own, with the minimum viable level of segmentation.
Long-tail returns in customer acquisition
Let’s examine an example from this summer, emails sent from a brand called BYLT. They’re not a client, so this is my perception as a professional email marketer who happens to be their customer.
Personal shopping is my favorite research lab.
Not familiar with BYLT? Here’s the quick rundown:
- DTC Apparel company
- Specialized in “premium basics” suitable for work, the golf course, and the gym.
- Men are their core customers
- Later iterations yield Women’s and Kid’s collections
- 99% of emails focus on Men’s products
- Default email and SMS optin incentive: 20% off the first order
- Sale incentives: 20-30% off sitewide
For brands, an advantage of email is holding on to the prospect long enough for them to become a customer. You can gain long-tail returns at a lower cost than retargeting ads month after month.
Because BYLT retained me as a subscriber, they were able to nurture my cold abandoned cart to the point of getting my first order. It took approximately 90 days. Several discount offers went ignored.
Here are some lessons to be learned about segmenting an email list from what they’re doing:
A tactic to improve your segmentation strategy
BYLT’s customer acquisition journey for me started with a word-of-mouth referral. I subscribed 3 months ago after a recommendation on Twitter/X.
I browsed the site, added a few things to my cart. Then I left those items behind.
Each time someone abandons their cart there’s a reason why. This is your first opportunity for improvement through segmentation and automation:
Split your Abandoned Cart flow between prospects and customers.
Someone placing their first order with an apparel brand might need reassurance about the return policy in case their items don’t fit.
You might also affirm the quality of your products, to put their fears of buyer’s remorse at ease.
Compare that to abandoned cart emails sent to your existing customers, where it’s just a quick reminder of what they left behind.
BYLT did not segment in this way. So my abandoned cart went cold. No purchase in the first 30 days after optin. Nor the second 30 days either.
During this time, BYLT sent me one email every 1-3 days. Sometimes, 2 in one day.
That frequency was way too high. I nearly unsubscribed 3 times.
Content relevance, engagement, and prospect nurturing
A segmenting best practice focuses on recent engagement with emails. The primary metric evaluated is if an email was opened at least once within the last 30-90 days.
Did BYLT do this? Not well enough.
- The last time I opened an email from BYLT was 2 weeks ago.
- Since then, they sent 9 additional campaign emails.
- I opened 0.
- BUT they likely think I did open, which is why they kept sending them…
Remember hearing about privacy changes Apple made with iOS 15? That confuses email segmenting by engagement.
Here’s how:
- I gave my Gmail address at optin.
- That Gmail syncs with my iPhone’s native Mail app, and my Macbook’s native Mail app.
- This means anytime I receive an email, Apple sends an “open” event on the backend BEFORE I even see the email, let alone decide to open it or not.
Apple calls this privacy protection. It makes segmenting your list and evaluating the true engagement of your audience a careful practice that requires analysis…
Do you send to your unengaged subscribers, or not?
The short answer is no.
The nuanced answer is yes, at a lower frequency than your most active people. And when you do send to them, personally relevant emails are most likely to get them to re-engage.
Let’s tie this back to where our story began.
Though I didn’t open most of BYLT’s recent emails, I’m genuinely a prospect.
But 99% of the time, they’re not segmenting my emails for a women’s shopper. They asked for my preference data, and I gave it to them.
I expected their emails follow up on the promise they made by offering that preference. BYLT missed 10 opportunities to send me relevant emails featuring women’s products.
That’s one reason I delayed my purchase about 3 months. The emails fell flat, being mostly for men.
I’ve debated testing their products. Questioned if they’ll fit right. Returns are a hassle.
Last week, my shopper’s pain points reached peak frustration. I’ve been training in the gym and now my go-to work pants don’t fit anymore.
So I placed my order. The long-tail reward of BYLT nurturing me from prospect to customer, drip by email drip, kicked in.
This is why email retention depends on making sure people do not unsubscribe. If they leave your list, you can’t send them marketing emails.
So give your unengaged people some space, but not so much they forget about your brand.
Do you have an engaged audience? Check your segments…
Some of your customers’ experiences are like mine with BYLT. A recent campaign’s subject line was curious.
It stood out in my inbox. That reminded me I was still debating the original purchase I started 3 months ago.
So I went directly to their website. I did not open that email, didn’t click any links. I’m still an unengaged subscriber.
Apple privacy opens have been confusing BYLT’s engagement signals, but does it matter? I saw their subject line previews each time I checked my inbox. I just didn’t open any of them.
The last email campaign sent 2 days before my purchase did its job. No open necessary.
This is what your subscribers experience. Every day, every week. Your email strategy for this summer impacts your engagement through the next 90 days.
That impacts the ratio of your list that’s unengaged.
How you segment your emails now to address that ratio impacts your ability to stand out in the FLOOD of emails that will fill your customer’s inboxes in Q4.
Get clear on how you define an “engaged” subscriber.
And, if you’re going to make a promise to your list by offering an email preferences page, keep that promise when you segment your campaigns.
Try out the tactics I shared today.
