If you’re not using email segmentation then you’re missing out on huge boosts in ROI. Consider this – research shows that anything between 70-80% of email marketing ROI comes from segmentation.
Put in another way, even if you continue to get the exact same amount and type of traffic, but just simply start segmenting your subscribers, you will see a many-fold increase in back-end profits.
While there are countless ways to segment, I’ve decided to help you avoid all the unnecessary overwhelm. So I went ahead and compiled for you this list of the 7 high-ROI segmentation secrets that are easy to start utilizing immediately.
And even though I’ve already whittled down the list down from hundreds of items to just seven high-ROI options, it’s still wise to take it in chunks. Try to read about all seven, but then make a note which ones you want to implement first. Implementing them all at once might be a tad much.
1) Let Subscribers Self-Segment
These days we have access to so many cool automation features, that we think it is the only way to do thing. And don’t get me wrong, that’s why we include a super-powerful yet simple-and-easy-to-use automation builder with all accounts. We even include it in our forever-free plan.
And if you want to go ahead and go crazy on building all these automations that intelligently segment people for you, go ahead. Here’s an awesome guide to help you with that.
However, don’t forget that we can still actually ask our subscribers to let us know what they’re interested in. Yes, actually ask them as the humans they are to choose their actual interests.
You can simply include a message in your email footer section that says “set your preferences”. This text can link to a form where your subscribers can select what they care about in a granular fashion. You can ask what they want to learn more about, and what emails they want to see less of.
Next, you want to hook their answers up to their subscriber profile on your email automation service. If they select what their interests are, you’d send those values to the “interests” custom field in your email automation software.
From then on, automations would segment and treat people differently based on the values inside of their custom fields. To learn more about this, read our ultimate guide on using email automation to boost profits.
This is an easy hack to implement with Emercury:
- With Gravity Forms, you would simply use our free add-on here
- If you use Elementor to build forms, just use our free add-on here
If you use a different form-builder, let us know, and we can help you get it hooked up.
2) Determine What Spurred the Initial Subscription
It is generally a good idea to keep track of where the person signed up. Was it on a popup that appears over your blog posts? Did they submit their info into a Facebook lead ad? Was it a full-fledged Unbounce landing page?
In all of these cases, you can pass that value to a custom field inside of their Emercury subscriber record. With Gravity Forms, you would have a hidden field that passes that value to the appropriate custom field in Emercury. With Unbounce, you would do much the same.
If you need help to achieve this “passing values to custom fields” thing, just let us know, we’re here to help. This can be done with almost any lead-capture or form-building software you use. Contact us if you use something that we don’t have a guide for yet.
Once you have these values stored for subscribers, you can then build automations that segment them and treat them differently
That is, you can treat people differently if they came from some blog post popup, rather than if they came from a full-fledged landing page.
Alternatively, it might make more sense to treat people differently based on what they were promised in exchange for their email. Did they signup in exchange for a lead magnet? Or did they signup because a popup promised lots of cool free tips?
You would use the same method as described above. Simply pass those values to a custom field called “signup reason”. If they signed up from something offering “free tips in your inbox”, then pass the value “free tips newsletter”. Then automatically segment people off of that.
3) Try Treating People Differently Based on Originating Source
If you want to get serious about your marketing in general, you will want to track source attribution in everything that you do. This is just a fancy way of saying that you know how people arrived at your site.
The industry-standard way to accomplish this is through using something known as a UTM_tag. It’s those things you see at the end of a URL. It helps software know how a person arrived at a given landing page.
- Let’s say that your landing page is at example.com/main-form
- With a UTM it would appear as example.com/main-form/?utm_source=Facebook
What’s the point to all of this? Well, different marketing software can actually read it, utilize it or pass it along
- For example, if your landing page uses a Gravity Form, you can have your gravity form read the UTM Tag in the URL and store it in a hidden field. Our gravity-forms add-on will make sure to pass along that value to a custom field in your Emercury account when the person hits submit on the form.
- If you’re using Unbounce to build your landing pages, same thing. Unbounce can read those URL parameters, and place them inside of a hidden field. You can then pass the value of those hidden fields to Emercury.
- Elementor, same thing. Use the dynamic request feature to fill in a field with a value from the URL. Then, our Elementor add-on will make sure it’s passed to Emercury when they submit the form.
- If you’re using other software, let us know if you need help to tie it to your Emercury account.
Let’s look at an actual example:
People who come land at your page as example.com/main-form?utm_source=Facebook can automatically get “Facebook” filled in as the value in their “Lead Source” field inside of Emercury – after they finish filling out the form that is.
People who come land at your page as example.com/main-form?utm_source=Instagram can automatically get “Instagram” filled in as the value in their “Lead Source” field inside of Emercury once they’re registered.
From there on, you can build automations that segment subscribers based on the value inside of their “Lead source” field.
4) Auto-Segment by Email Responsiveness
Here is a trick that most people don’t get. The best email marketers put most of their effort into mastering and applying those timeless basics of email marketing. And the older a trick is, the closer it is to being a foundational element.
When it comes to email automation, the first forms of auto-segmentation were all based on email responsiveness. That is whether people or open an email and which links they click on. We’ve had this ability since before we even invented fancy multi-step, multi-condition visual automation builders. Back when people could trigger off an autoresponder off a single condition.
And guess what, someone that’s mastered using a single condition automation system triggering off of whether a person opened an email (or clicked a link), will make way more profit than marketers trying to get too fancy with everything that’s available today.
So here’s your best secret for today. Understand that segmenting by opens and clicks is still supremely powerful, and try to start out building simple automations based and opens and clicks. You can always get fancier later on. Our automation builder sure allows you to.
5) Based on Shopping Behaviour
This will apply to you if you run an e-commerce business. The good news is that Emercury has full-fledged support for both Woocommerce and Shopify. Though, we can help you integrate with almost any e-commerce platform that you might be using.
When it comes to segmenting people in an e-commerce business, there are many ways to do it. You can do so based on abandoned cart actions, the number of purchases, the category of the product that they last purchased, the amount of money they’ve spent so far, and pretty much any of the shopping data available to you.
6) Send the occasional survey or quiz
This is another situation where people fail to utilize a classic method because they’re too focused on the latest gimmicks and automatic segmentation based on behaviours. Surveys and quizzes have existed as a marketing tool for as long as marketing has been a thing.
You can and you should still occasionally use these where appropriate. The difference is that these days we capture people a lot earlier in the customer journey, so you obviously wait for more engagement before sending a longer survey. However, you can and you should still do it.
And just as with the previous hacks, you can build this survey using Elementor, Gravity Forms or another form solution. The trick with a survey is that you just have to spend more time thinking about what answer should correspond to passing which values into which custom field.
This is different from a preferences form where things are more straightforward. You would simply have people tick from a list of interests, and send those interests to the “interests” custom field. A survey will require you to sit down, potentially with paper and pen, and think about this a bit more. But it’s well worth it.
7) Track and segment by customer journey stages
It doesn’t matter what business you are in, all of your customers will have to go through a journey to become a paying customer. And any journey can be broken down into typical stages that most people will go through. These are then typically mapped out in the form of a “funnel”.
There are a ton of different “journey models”, funnels and stages. A classic model would say people go through the awareness, interest, desire and action stages. A more custom model for a bike shop might say their stages are: enter the shop, ask around, try a bike, purchase a bike.
In any case, it is useful to actually sit down and map out those stages for your own business. And then, go ahead and build a way to track when a person has entered a stage.
How do you do track all of this?
Well, let’s say that you have an “interest stage”. You might decide to say people enter that stage after they’ve opened a certain important email in your onboarding sequence, or click any link in your emails.
With Emercury this is easy to track. Just build your onboarding email sequences with our automation builder. And then, have any clicks set the “Stage” custom field to “Interested”. Once they finish the onboarding process, in the next automations, you can account for “desire”.
Simply set it so that opening your sales emails, or clicking on a product offer should change their stage to “desire”.
Segmenting from there on is quite easy
Using the automation builder, you can build automations that segment people based on their values in the “Stage” field. You would also build your sequences and automations in such a way that they treat people differently based on this value.
Bonus Tip: None of these tricks will work without a solid email platform
Applying the correct strategies to your email marketing isn’t just about knowing the tricks themselves. You also need the right kind of software to make it all happen.
At Emercury we’ve worked really hard to make sure you can easily apply all of these strategies with our software. In fact, we go out of our way to keep the software simple enough to get you going immediately, yet include all the features to allow you to apply the most fundamental and powerful strategies in email marketing and email marketing automation.
In fact, we include almost every feature we have in our forever-free plan. Only a few of the more advanced email features are reserved for the paid plans. However, all segmentation and automation features are included with every free account.
Since this is kind of a crazy thing to give away for free, we might change this at any time, so be sure lock-in your forever-free account straight away, while we still offer it.
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