The days of big email blasts and the same-deal-for-everyone are over. We’re now in the age of careful personalization, especially when it comes to email marketing.

[bctt tweet=”The days of big email blasts and the same-deal-for-everyone are over” username=”jilt”]

Customers are tired of generic marketing. They want brands to serve them content and offers that appeal to them. If they don’t connect with your emails, they’ll unsubscribe, and you may lose those customers forever.

The benefits of personalization for marketers are undeniable. 74 percent of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement. 94 percent of marketing professionals say personalization is an important part of meeting their email marketing objectives. And according to Experian, personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates.

And yet, few companies bother. Only 5 percent of companies personalize extensively. That means you have a big opportunity to stand out from your competition.

You may not be a big data company like Facebook or Uber, but you can build your own data profiles of your customers to fuel personalization through a technique called segmentation.

It’s true that your customers are unique. Even though they all buy your products, their demographics, behavior, interests, and other characteristics can vary widely.

For instance, a 13-year-old girl preparing for her first school dance and a 28-year-old professional preparing for a new job may both buy makeup; however, they don’t respond to the same messaging. And the guys who are only on that list because they buy gifts for their girlfriends may not want a message at all.

Since your subscribers are all different, treating them all the same isn’t just ineffective – it’s counterproductive. You could push people away from your brand if they don’t think it’s for them.

Segmentation is the practice of organizing your subscribers into groups based on whatever characteristics you find useful. Then you can deliver content and offers that resonate with each group, rather than blasting the same message to everyone.

According to Campaign Monitor, emails with personalized subject lines are 26 percent more likely to be opened, and marketers report a 760 percent increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns.

MailChimp reports similar results. Segmented campaigns outperform unsegmented campaigns in every metric.

For example, a clothing retailer would naturally segment its list by gender, then show men’s products to men and women’s products to women. If subscribers have to wade through emails that don’t apply to them, there’s a good chance they’ll judge the emails irrelevant and unsubscribe.

Furthermore, segmentation helps you gain a keener understanding of the customers you serve. Once you drill down and look at a group closely, you’ll learn insights about those people that wouldn’t be apparent when you examined your entire list.

For instance, you might learn…

• Which types of people are more receptive to upsells and cross-sells
• Which customers are cheapest to retain and which are the most costly
• Why certain customers make purchases
• Which customers are willing to try new products and which rely on their favorites

[bctt tweet=”There’s really no limit to what you can learn once you segment people into small groups and examine them closely.” username=”jilt”]

There’s really no limit to what you can learn once you segment people into small groups and examine them closely. All of this information should make its way to your buyer personas.

So when you segment, doesn’t that mean that each email you send will actually reach fewer people? Yes, but that’s not a bad thing.

When Optimove measured the average uplift of campaigns sent to 30 million customers, they discovered that campaigns sent to smaller groups produced the best results. That is, you make the most money when you send to smaller segments of your list and use more relevant content for each group.

[bctt tweet=”You make the most money when you send to smaller segments of your list” username=”jilt”]

For instance, campaigns sent to groups with 150 customers had an uplift of about $1.90, but campaigns sent to 1,500+ people had an uplift of only $0.50.

It seems counterintuitive to make more money on fewer people, but it works because those messages are more personalized to the recipient, which makes them more likely to take action.

Segmentation is so powerful that it creates dramatic effects for even the biggest retailers.

When computer retailer Lenovo hired an analytics firm, it realized that nearly half of its customers were new, unknown visitors. When the company segmented this group into specific categories, it ultimately increased conversions by 40 percent and increased average revenue per customer by 25 percent.

The pillars of segmentation describe the four main types of data you can collect on your customers: Geographics, demographics, psychographics, and behavioral. Any data point you might need falls into one of these four groups.

Breaking data points into four categories helps you see opportunities for combining segmentation criteria.

For instance, you might choose to send a collection of winter coats to wealthy women living in cold climates who value style-over-function and have purchased from you in the past. That’s an extremely targeted group, which means the content you create would be highly personalized.

The data points on that image above aren’t the only ones you can track and use to segment your list. Feel free to track whichever data points matter to your eCommerce business and come up with your own segmentation criteria.

Furthermore, you don’t have to segment for every data point, just the ones that impact your business or are relevant for the specific type of email you are sending. Some segments might provide some quick wins. Others might have little ROI now, but great ROI over time. And some might be entirely meaningless.

(Pro tip: Behavioral data is some of the hardest to acquire, but it comes with the best ROI because it tells you exactly what your customers like to purchase.)

[bctt tweet=”Behavioral data is some of the hardest to acquire, but it comes with the best ROI” username=”jilt”]

It’s helpful to look past your customers’ current state and segment based on what they want to be or want to achieve. For more information on that, read this guide: Using jobs-to-be-done with your eCommerce store.

Jilt’s segmentation feature helps you target emails intelligently using customer and order data collected from your store. This makes your automated emails and email campaigns personalized and more effective. Ultimately, you’ll make more money by sending emails that are more relevant to your customers.

Instead of blasting emails to a big group, you can now automatically send campaigns to people when they meet any number of certain conditions (behaviors and events).

You can segment based on order details for emails including cart abandonment campaigns, post-purchase follow-ups, review requests, replenishment reminders.

And you can segment on customer details for all of the above, plus other emails including welcome emails and custom customer campaigns.

With all of the segmentation options to choose from, you can set up an targeted campaigns that better address your specific customers. For example, you might want to segment by cart size: Send different abandoned cart emails to people who have more than $100 worth of products in their cart and people who have less. For the higher carts, you could spotlight your customer service and offer to answer any questions holding the customer back from a big-ticket purchase; for the lower carts, you could offer a discount to help get the transaction done.

Really, segmentation just comes down to your understanding of your customers and your imagination. You can see all of our segmenting options here.

With Jilt, you can run an unlimited number of campaigns, using segments to target specific groups of customers with highly personalized emails. (If that sounds intimidating, we have sample segmentation rules and email templates for every type of campaign; customize or don’t to your heart’s content.) You can combine multiple rules to group your email recipients into hyper-targeted segments based on real-time order information and fill each email with dynamic content based on the customer’s behavior.

[content_upgrade cu_id=”1271″]Free download: The different ways you can segment your eCommerce email subscribers[content_upgrade_button]Click Here[/content_upgrade_button][/content_upgrade]

Stop sending email blasts

It’s almost never smart to send the same email “blast” to your entire list. The only exception is if your eCommerce store sells a single product.

[bctt tweet=”It’s almost never smart to send the same email “blast” to your entire list” username=”jilt”]

Furthermore, refrain from crafting an email and then deciding which segment to send it to. That’s backward. Instead, decide who you want to communicate with and then craft the email that’s right for that group.

If you’re diligent about collecting data on your customers, segmenting them into groups, and sending the email content they want to see, you’ll realize the real power of an email list.