The Problem With Manual Email Segmentation
Email segmentation is changing in exciting ways. What began as a simple way to deliver personalized emails has now become a sophisticated way of providing engaging, 1:1 customer experiences.
This article will cover email segmentation in general and also how it is evolving to overcome the problems associated with manual segmentation.
What is Email Segmentation?
Email segmentation is the process by which marketers group portions of their customer database according to defined similarities. Segments can be defined by geography, purchase history, email engagement, interests, and other characteristics.
Why Is Email Segmentation Important?
Email segmentation came about because marketers needed something more effective than “batch and blast” email campaigns. It also became clear that customers were demanding more personalized communications from brands.
Personalized emails can be much more effective, and segmentation allows marketers to send personalized messages based on the shared characteristics. The messages become more relevant and useful to the recipient, positively impacting sales and retention.
Why Is Manual Email Segmentation Ineffective?
Manual segmentation is resource-intensive. Marketing teams spend loads of time testing the effectiveness of various content and offers with their segments and the segmentation itself is error-prone because it is based on guesswork. Manual segmentation provides a very baseline level of personalization since it is personalizing at the group level versus the individual level.
Marketers have seen that manual segmentation can suddenly become ineffective when habits change, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. They are also seeing how privacy changes and trends such as the iOS15 impact on open rates affect the effectiveness of manual segmentation, since it is often based on just one or two segmentation conditions. If one of those conditions is open rate, the efficacy of the segmentation is lost.
Check out this article for actual campaign results highlighting the need for advanced segmentation strategies and 1:1 personalization.
Brands have seen that they need advanced technology and techniques in order to continuously respond in precise ways to changing customer behaviors and preferences.
How is Email Segmentation Evolving?
Current market conditions are requiring much more sophisticated segmentation practices, and marketers are embracing the technology and techniques that bring them closer to delivering the 1:1 personalization that customers expect.
Leading brands are using the newest, A.I.-enabled segmentation techniques to get an idea of customer engagement at a granular level. These insights can reveal untapped business opportunities, and help brands make strategic decisions without affecting other customer segments.
The leading marketing automation platforms pull purchase and other data from Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce and other ecommerce platforms into the Customer Data Platform (or CDP), allowing the machine learning and A.I. to process rich, deep sets of meaningful data and drive better results.
Reaping the Rewards of Advanced Email Segmentation
How might advanced segmentation techniques benefit your brand? Powered by predictive analytics and A.I., advanced email segmentation can handle an abundance of segmentation conditions, such as customer engagement on the website, product searches, and email clicks, and then compare the data with all other customers to predict the segment.
This is a far cry from manual segmentation in terms of precision and scalability, and marketers are seeing much greater results in terms of cost and time savings, better deliverability, and improved conversion rates and list growth rates
ReSci is a team of marketers and data scientists on a mission to democratize AI. We make powerful recommendations and predictions accessible to brands.
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