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.

What’s the future of Marketing?

2019 is the year of marketing science catches up to the art. While once revered as more art than science, the discipline of marketing is becoming increasingly technical. As modern day practitioners, it has become table stakes to have some level of technical acumen on how the marketing technology stack plugs together. The more aware and tech-savvy marketers are going to be the ones that win the customer experience battleground.

The roles within marketing organizations are shifting now that AI has arrived. For example - now marketing operations can leave list pulling, campaign execution and reporting to intelligent machines. Now, less burdened with these tasks, they’re shifting themselves to become much more focused on data sciences as it relates to the bigger picture. The evolving role scape is moving away from order taking and execution to requiring that practitioners have a deeper understanding of and influence over the complete business strategy.

As digital marketing savviness is now common amongst modern marketers, there will be less need to work with outside creative and media-buying agencies. This year this shift will bring a significant number of those more specialized discipline in-house, as brands find that they can develop and source high-quality work from within their own department at a lower overall cost, and with a greater level of transparency and control.

What’s old in marketing will become retro again. Consumers are more tuned in to digital marketing manipulation and leery of data privacy abuses – making them more skeptical and hence less responsive to even hyper-targeted digital advertising. The current wave of digital marketing has become overcooked. In response, marketers will look back to more traditional analog and out-of-home strategies with fresh eyes. This resurgent “retro marketing” trend will find an audience with digitally weary consumers looking for a more personalized, human relationship with the brands they engage with.

In this era of data privacy, consumers are empowered to decide not just what brands they do business with, but what brands they are willing to interact at all. The value exchange between vendor and consumer must be crystal clear in any marketing interaction. Anything else and vendors risk the future viability of engaging with their audiences. This not only increases the importance of personalization but also the authenticity of those interactions. Brands must show customers that they respect their data by using it to engage with them in a way that drives real value – not just to drive revenue for their business, but to truly help the consumers in some way.

Marketers will reject any vanity marketing metrics that does little to show the value of marketing, such as attribution KPIs, ROAS etc. Simpler metrics that focus on engagement and outcomes will prevail. Marketers will ask themselves: did we increase engagement with targeted contacts? This approach will become the standard to measure all marketing campaigns. By building a contact engagement model that underpins all interaction channels, marketing departments can then measure spend increases against engaged contacts within the customer organization.

Customer Acquisition with your own Data

In the battle for customer acquisition, data plays an important role in marketing strategy, along with a desired product and excellent creative. There’s also the challenge of reaching a target audience where they spend most of their time, which today is within mobile apps and browsing social media. When we look at Google, Facebook and Amazon from the perspective of an advertiser, we see that they utilize much more data for their own benefit than they make available for audience segmentation.

While numerous data sources are available for targeting across most digital properties, one of the most effective ways brands can target is by bringing their existing opted-in datasets to social media. This frequently provides a competition advantage over the “walled gardens” of the major technology players, as your own data is typically much more relevant to your marketing efforts. The four major sites – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat – all provide advertisers the ability to create custom audiences using their own data, and in some cases to use third-party data sets.

Typically, the most utilized datasets to match against are email addresses, identifiers/tags provided by the social media sites themselves and mobile advertising IDs. Most sites require a minimum of 1,000 records in order to create a custom audience. This is for privacy reasons and to ensure that the segment is large enough to deliver appropriately.

The ability to create custom audiences on social media allows advertisers to reframe many of their existing marketing tactics. They can encourage repeat visits, whether in-store or online, from existing customers, or try to win shoppers from competitive locations. Brands without physical locations that seek to go directly to the consumer can use custom audiences to reach their market on social media as well. Most sites also allow advertisers to create “lookalike” audiences to help increase the scale of the campaign. They look for common characteristics from the audience you’ve uploaded and find similar consumers for your campaign to reach.

Aside from being able to reach a relevant audience, bringing your own data to a social media site can also result in performance improvements and cost savings. Using own opted-in data sets will become an increasingly important tactic for the marketer’s overall customer acquisition strategy to achieve that goal.

Lessons from Cambridge Analytica Incident

If FB users can learn one important lesson from the Cambridge Analytica Incident, where the data of nearly 50 Million Facebook users was allegedly used to manipulate the USA Elections, it is this, there’s no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to sharing personal data like images, posts and preferences on social networking sites.

Though these sites and apps are purportedly free because they do not charge users, it is a no brainer that they get their Return on Investment (ROI) from the mountains of personal data that can be mined with the help of algorithms to enhance user experience and sell relevant advertisements.

Gullible users willingly share their personal data with these sites without understanding the consequences. However, even knowledgeable users face a conundrum when signing up for such sites and apps. For instance, whenever a user downloads an app, it tells you all it is capable of. You have to click on the agree button if you want to avail of the services.

The Facebook app, among other things, tells you that it can directly call numbers, read phone status and identity, read your text messages, take pictures and videos, record audio, record your approximate location, precise location, modify your contacts, real call logs, read your contacts, add or modify calendar events and send emails to guests without owners knowledge, read calendar events plus confidential information, read, modify or even delete the contents of your memory card and add or remove accounts.

Smartphone and mobile apps can make one a smart and efficient employee with all the information they collect as a trade-off, similar to how websites and e-commerce sites provide better services with the help of cookies, small pieces of code that track your online behavior and predict your next move with great accuracy.

Besides, ad networks may gather the information apps collect, including your location data, and may combine it with the kind of information you provide when you register for a service or buy something online to send you targeted ads that may be relevant to someone with your preferences and in your location.

Privacy by design effectively means that privacy principles such as preventing harm, transparency, choice, etc., are built into the architecture of the product itself. Thus, businesses need to include privacy and its related principles at the time of building of the product itself and not as an afterthought. Further, given that privacy by design presumes that the user is central to the entire system, meaningful consent and the real ability to withdraw this consent is another fundamental premise.

In many cases such as Aadhaar where the case in sub judice, quasi-government bodies will consistently pressure you to sign up, failing which you will have to run to the courts to queue up for justice. So you may end up signing up for these services, either because you feel helpless to fight the state or just do not have enough time to fight the system. India desperately needs a separate Privacy Act. The Right to Privacy, as enshrined in the Constitution, does not suffice when it comes to information security.

India also lacks a comprehensive policy on data protection or online security – the Indian Information Technology Act (2008) or amended rules in 2011 are not adequate. The Electronic Frontier Foundation advocates that “tech companies can and should do more to protect users, including giving users far more control over what data is collected and how that data is used.

Globally, the European Union (EU) is the most stringent when it comes to data protection. After four years of preparation and debate, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was finally approved by the EU Parliament on 14 April 2016. The enforcement date is 25 May 2018, and companies that do not comply with this law may face heavy fines. GDPR replaces the Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC) and “was designed to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens’ data privacy and to reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy”, according to GDPR Portal.

The positive fallout of the Facebook data compromise is that the Indian government, too, is firming up its long-term strategy to secure data of citizens, especially those using social media. As Algorithms increasingly enhance user experience and the bottom line of firms, users must not let their guard down since these very algorithms can enable unparalleled invasions of privacy.

Economics of Privacy in Digital World

Information capture sits at the heart of important parts of the digital economy. The transaction in online services is radically different from what we usually encounter. We voluntarily pay in personal data rather than cash. This unique contract creates several complications as far as privacy goes.

Our relationship with companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon is at once and sour. These services are made irresistible because of their personalized user experience. The algorithms sitting at the heart of these companies guide you to what is most likely to interest you. But the world is now waking up to the harsh fact that the same process also raises privacy concerns as it encroaches into hitherto intimate areas of our lives.

Digital exchange – personal information for free access to platforms often means that privacy comes at a cost. Customers are better off sharing information about themselves with marketers because it makes life easier. Junk email or unsolicited phone calls that are an annoyance to consumers become less so when the company can target consumers better through data analysis.

However, the potential for personal data to be abused – for discrimination, manipulation and censorship is a huge cause for concern. The new world of large server farms plus algorithms that sift through data to seek patterns can sometimes make us the victims of targeted manipulation. So why do people have to share their data with the digital behemoths? The simple answer is that they choose to do so. In some cases, the consent to collect information is presumed, and the degree of privacy the user experiences is a function of self-help; you can disable some surveillance if you can figure out how. In other cases, customers explicitly agree to privacy policies that basically define the control they don’t have.

Since Businesses value the data more, imposing onerous “opt-in” rules is a significant transaction cost. This could jeopardize the ability of digital companies to provide services, and significantly degrade user experience. The efficient solution would be to award the initial ownership of data to the business, but let users opt out if they want to.

If you sell your car, the owner of the car can’t legitimately influence your life after the conclusion of the transaction. Personal data can be used to manipulate people in ways they don’t recognize at the time of sharing their data. This is something that current systems designed to facilitate the one-time transfer of personal information to the digital company and without the individual’s subsequent information to the digital company and involvement in decision making about the use of the collected data, don’t take into account.

Traditionally, private property has been the main barrier to privacy invasion. As monitoring and recording capabilities are embedded in our surroundings, there is a need to redefine private spaces that will not be infringed. The government and businesses should start by adopting privacy-by-design principles in their data accumulation practices. Governments and Supreme courts all over the world will have to rethink their stand in order to secure citizens privacy and control over their data and the meaning of such words as “property” and “consent” in relation to personal data sharing.