Using Email Audience Segmentation To Increase Conversions & Revenue

Email Marketing

Jul 10

Email is often positioned as a communication tool. Brands often batch and blast the same email to their entire list.
While yes, email is a good way to stay in direct contact with your audience, it can also be so much more than that.

With a shift in strategy, email can become a powerful tool for driving conversions, increasing revenue, and boosting customer retention.

The secret to getting more out of your email marketing is audience segmentation.

When you segment your audience and create content for specific personas, funnels, and goals, email marketing changes from a communication tool to a primary revenue channel.

Here’s how you can use audience segmentation in your email marketing strategy to drive better results.

How To Segment Your Audience

Like most marketing, the key to results-oriented email marketing comes from knowing your audience. Rather than sending the same email to your entire list, segment your audience based on specific factors that help you better understand what they want and need.

Segment your audience into more defined groups based on:

Behavior: Email opens, email clicks, website activity, content downloads, etc.
Lifecycle Stage: Cold lead, warm prospect, active customer, former customer, etc.
Demographics: Industry, role, geography, etc.
Purchase History: Products purchased, time since last purchase, customer lifetime value, etc.

Types of Segmented Emails to Consider

Different types of emails work best for specific audiences, goals, and stages of the buyer’s funnel. Choose the best type of email for your unique audience segment. Here are a few examples.

Welcome/Nurture Series: Sent to new leads, guides prospects to becoming customers
Promotional/Seasonal: Drives timely action, sent to promote a specific product or service, could be for a limited time or at a launch
Educational/Value-Add: Builds trust and thought leadership, warms cold leads, provides free value and support
Reactivation: Re-engages dormant contacts, gives incentives to reconnect or buy again
Upsell/Cross-sell: Sent after a purchase or conversion, increases average order value or lifetime value
Abandoned Cart/Activity: Sent when customers fail to complete a purchase, or a user doesn’t complete a demo or consultation scheduling behavior. Abandon emails drive customers to complete their transaction/conversion
Transactional: Shares details of a purchase, often overlooked but can drive additional conversions while customers are highly engaged

How to Optimize Your Email Efforts for Conversions

Audience segmentation is just one step in turning your emails from a communication channel into a sales tool. Use these additional tips to optimize your emails to drive more conversions and sales.

Focus on one call-to-action (CTA) per email. Don’t confuse audiences by giving them too many choices. Position each email around one specific CTA.
Use buttons instead of text for CTAs. Draw your audience’s eye to the next step. Use buttons to encourage readers to click.
Use personalization. Catch attention by adding personalized details, such as the reader’s name or location.
Engage in A/B testing. Don’t guess at what works. Test different subject lines, CTAs, send times, and messaging to find the version of your email that drives the most conversions.
Clean your list. The quality of your list matters more than the size. Regularly remove inactive contacts to keep your list filled with the most interested and engaged audiences.
Don’t set it and forget it. Schedule time to go back to your automated email sequences to update and periodically improve the copy, design, and messaging.
Optimize for mobile and accessibility. Make it easy for everyone to read your email. Ensure emails adhere to mobile-friendly and accessibility best practices.

Sending the Right Emails at the Right Time

When you send an email is as important as what you include in an email. Get strategic about email frequency, send times, and cadence. Consider the email type, purpose, and audience when scheduling campaigns, sequences, and newsletters.

For example, a newsletter might perform best when sent on a specific time and day, while a welcome series will perform best when sent immediately after a user opts in. A cross-sell email might need to be sent within two hours of a purchase, while a re-engagement email might need to go out after 30 days of no customer activity.

Make educated assumptions about the best email send times, and then, track your analytics and test new send times until data shows which performs best with your audience.

Track Email Metrics That Matter

A strategic approach to email marketing must include tracking analytics and using data to identify trends and potential improvements. When you use segmented emails, collect data that helps you understand the effectiveness of your approach to content, messaging, timing, and audience selection. Don’t just look at open rates. Track metrics for:

Click-through rate (CTR)
Revenue per email
Conversion rate
Bounce rate
Churn/unsubscribe rate
List growth and engagement health

Begin comparing metrics with relevant industry averages. For example, HubSpot reports that the average CTR for B2B is 2.21% and 1.91% for SaaS. Open rates for B2B are around 39.48% and 38.14% for SaaS. These numbers will give you a starting point as you collect data. Once you have your own data, set benchmarks for improvement based on your past performance.

Email Marketing Tools We Love

When looking for an email marketing tool, choose a platform that offers detailed audience segmentation and ideally works directly within or alongside your CRM. Use a tool that allows you tag users based on your custom categories as well as user interactions with your forms and emails.

We love HubSpot and recommend it to our clients because of its robust customer relationship management (CRM) features. We also like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and Kit.

Drive More Email Conversions with Audience Segmentation

If you’re struggling to see real, measurable results from email, you may need a new approach.

Instead of seeing email marketing as a standard communications tool, reposition your approach to see email as a sales channel and revenue driver. Use audience segmentation to create targeted email marketing campaigns that can convert audiences, drive sales, and lead to lasting customer retention.

If you need help with the process, SpotOn is here to help. Let’s talk about your current email marketing strategy, dive into your audience profiles, and develop email marketing campaigns that drive more high-value conversions for your brand. Contact us to learn more.

Robyn Spoto