Email Segments to build for Marketing

Segmenting your list can be a successful way to target your audience and ensure your contacts remain interested. This can help direct your marketing sends to be more thoughtful and less aggressive, preventing opt-outs and resulting in a lift in overall engagement and revenue. Create a better subscriber experience by sending contacts engaging emails that are relevant based on their browse behavior, purchase activity, demographics, and/or acquisition source. Here are top 11 segments to consider building today.

Based on Overall Account Status

Master Segment - Narrow down your list from all subscribers to all active users. In most cases, best practice is to send to at maximum, contacts that have engaged within the last 12 months. Avoid sending to contacts who haven’t heard from you in a while as this will lead to a spike in complaints and unsubscribes. Filter out addresses that are suppressed due to previously unsubscribing, marking as spam, or bouncing repeatedly.

Based on Purchase Activity/Frequency

Non-Purchasers - Educate this segment about your brand and promote key differentiators from competitors. In addition to offering them a small incentive in your Welcome Series, consider providing steeper discounts in promotional campaigns to motivate their first purchase. 

One-Time Purchasers - Begin to build a relationship with new customers by keeping them informed from the moment of their first conversion through a simple post-purchase series, thanking them and building their knowledge of your brand. Encourage a repeat purchase by providing recommendations on how they can expand their collection. If they don’t convert a second time within your standard repurchase period, consider a triggered win back campaign to drive a repeat purchase.

2+ Purchasers - These customers are loyal to your brand. Now is the time to capture additional information on their interests through surveys, click tracking, purchase history, and browse behavior to support a more tailored experience through personalization.

Product/Product Category - Create segments for your top-level product categories, or for key hero products that are commonly purchased. Target these audiences with cross-sell messages to promote additional accessories coordinating with their past purchase or other specific products within their category of interest.

AOV - Knowing average order value is especially helpful if your brand offers a wide range of products at various price points. Segmenting based off of this data point can help determine upsell opportunities by allowing you to send details on products within slightly higher price ranges.

VIP - Tie together a combination of the above purchase data to determine an “above average” customer (contacts who’ve purchased 2+ times or spent above a particular threshold) and reward them with sweet treats like early access to promotions or new product launches. This often equates to around 15% of your total active list.

Lapsed Customers - Factor in time since last purchase to determine win back opportunities for customers who haven’t purchased in a while as a nudge to convert again based on average re-order timing for your customer base.

Based on Engagement Level

Non-Openers - This can be over time period or for a dedicated campaign. Minimize level of effort and maximize reach by simply updating Subject Line and Preheader from a previously sent creative. Keep in mind that this audience often generates lower revenue.

Unengaged - Before categorizing a contact unengaged, implement a Reengagement Series to give them one last opportunity to engage by highlighting what they’re missing out on, such as new product releases. If they remain dormant on your email list, consider retargeting these contacts on other channels.

Based on Demographic

Demographics - Consider a contact’s location for a few key reasons:

Compliance Regulations: Consent, data collection and retention, mailing regulations, and violation penalties vary based on country, and in some cases state-by-state. Ensure you’re including or suppressing contacts in compliance with CAN-SPAM (United States), CASL (Canada), GDPR (European Union), and CCPA (California).

Seasonality: Winter in Florida is not the same as winter in New York. Use a contact’s location to serve content relevant to the season or climate.

In Store Opportunities: If you have a brick and mortar presence, use a contact’s location to serve up their nearest store location, or printable coupons for in store offers.

Challenges in E-commerce

E-commerce spending has risen to $2.1 Trillion in the past few years and will reach $5 Trillion by 2020. Such rapid growth promises a great future for the Indian E-commerce industry signifying a strong market and increased customer demand. Despite these growth trends, many e-commerce businesses fail to take off within their first year. It is worth exploring the various challenges which the ecommerce industry faces today.

Borderless Economies – Mobile technology has empowered consumers in myriad ways. It has opened doors to a digital economy, taking globalization to a new level. Traditional boundaries are clearly blurring, with online retailers expanding to new geographies. This leaves companies to deal with government regulations, geopolitical status and extensive local and international competition. Modern E-commerce businesses are in race to provide the best premium services to their consumers while finding the right balance between globalization and localization.

Building Trust – Building consumer trust and brand loyalty is essential for any business to succeed. The traditional brand building exercises are mostly irrelevant in the current E-commerce sector. It is easy to lose an online customer. Failure to deliver on any one aspect of customers’ demands would lead to failure in retaining them.

Disparate Systems – There are various data management systems such as – Point of Sale, Enterprise Resource Planning and CRM systems. These systems differ tremendously in their architecture, deployment and usage, usually built on dated technology and are prone to stagnation. A great deal of your resources is being spent on separate systems, interfering with internal business demands and distracting the focus from the core tasks.

Lacks of Collaboration – There are four key divisions in E-commerce – Technology, Data Curation, Product Delivery and People management. Modern companies face the challenge of collaborating between different departments, some geographically isolated and present in different time zones. Marketer’s merchandisers and E-commerce managers need to learn to strategically operate through one integrated channel.

Personalization – Modern E-commerce thrives on delivering the best personalized experience to their consumers. Managing a repository of customer data is a challenge in itself, added to that e-commerce companies have to understand how to use that data. Delivering customized content in the form of advertisements, special offers etc. are some of the methods which can be employed.

Ease of Technology – Ease of use and technology have given consumers more power and increased global competition in the e-commerce sector. Omni-channel retailing is the way forward for e-commerce. This places pressure on companies to deal with technical issues of running an online store like server issues, bandwidth issues, dynamic IP address, data privacy and security issues. The transition from a multi-channel business to an omni-channel is another aspect that is not easily adopted by many companies.

Managing logistics, seller registration and inventory accounting present bigger challenges for the e-commerce companies. To overcome these challenges would require greater deployment of manual resources and can’t just be solved through cloud services.