3 Ways To Segment Your Email Subscribers

Many people regard email marketing as the holy grail of business. Unlike social media where you can lose your fans and followers should the network shut down, email marketing provides you the contact details of your leads and customers so you can communicate directly with them.

However, success isn’t about simply blasting all your emails to your subscribers. It’s about sending the right message to the right people at the right time. And this is achieved via email segmentation. Here are some ways to segment your email subscribers.

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Table Of Contents

What Is Email Segmentation?

Email segmentation is where you categorize your subscribers into smaller groups.

This is important because it allows you to send more targeted and personalized emails and newsletters, thereby enhancing customer experience and satisfaction.

It helps you to send the right message to the right people at the right time.

1. Demographics

The most common way to segment your subscribers is by demographics.

Gender
Age

Imagine that you’re a clothing brand. With this segment, you can send an email promoting your new skirts and dresses to women only. Or if you have a new range of trendy work clothes, you can send an email to people aged 25 to 35 years old.

This is a great segment if your products or services are tailored to certain gender or age. If your products or services are used by everyone, this might not be a useful segment.

Photo by Anemone123 on Pixabay

2. Geographic

Another segment is by location or country.

Again, your clothing brand might have branches across various countries. If you have an exclusive discount or sale for US branches, you can use this segment to send emails to US subscribers only. Or you can send emails about promotions that happen during country-specific holidays.

Big companies might find this valuable. But if you’re just starting your business, most of your subscribers might belong to the same country or the subscribers for each location would only be a handful. Thus, this geographic segment might not be useful. You can still keep country as a form field (in case you need it in the future). Some email marketing software like MailerLite, however, can detect geolocation so you can still roughly guess where subscribers are located.

3. Preferences & Interests

Preferences and interests are another way to segment your subscribers. Here are some examples:

Topics they’re interested in
Frequency they would like to hear from you

Compared to the other two segments, this is much broader. It really depends on how you want to group your subscribers and whatever categorization makes sense to you.

For instance, my blog has 3 topics: self-publishing, entrepreneurship and marketing. By default, most people will get emails for all 3 topics when they sign up for my newsletter. In the welcome email sequence, I ask them to only subscribe to topic(s) they’re interested in. I feel that this categorization is important because I want my subscribers to only receive emails they’re interested in. By offering them this power to choose, it’ll increase the engagement rate of my emails too.

You can do something similar by offering subscribers the option to receive emails they’re interested in. Also, you can offer weekly or monthly digest of latest blog posts.