Or: More Reasons to Segment Your List!
We’ve already written some past articles on segmenting your store’s email list.
It’s vitally important that you get the right messages to the right people at the right time in order to make more sales and generate more revenue.
And you do want more revenue, right?
But the way to do this is actually quite counterintuitive.
Are you making this mistake with your email list?
A BIG Email Mistake
This is one that I’ve made, and probably most stores have made at some point.
You want to make more sales, so it stands to reason that you would want to send email to the maximum number of people.
So just blast a campaign out to every single subscriber on your list, right?
WRONG!
While this seems like a good idea on the surface, as it turns out, this can do serious damage to your business.
A Surprising Stat
According to the data wizards at Klaviyo, “highly segmented campaigns return 3X the revenue per recipient as unsegmented campaigns.”1
THREE TIMES THE REVENUE!
Surprising, no?
What this tells you is that it’s far more profitable to send segmented campaigns than just to blast your entire list.
[Again, don’t feel bad if you’ve done this… I’ve done it A LOT before I really started studying up on this stuff. Apologies to those clients!]
But… Why?
The reason for this is relatively simple.
When you send campaigns to segmented lists, you are putting your offer in front of the people most likely to take you up on that offer.
This is going to be different for every business, as your segments will vary based on the sales cycle and use of your product.
Let’s say you have a consumable product of some kind. A typical order lasts your customer about 30 days.
You sell it out, there’s no stock for a few days or weeks, but now you’ve got more available, ready to be shipped out…
Who is more likely to be interested in this item:
- A person who bought it multiples times, most recently within the last 30-90 days?
- A person who has never made a purchase from you?
- A person who made one purchase of an unrelated item, 2 years ago?
Logic dictates that the person who has made multipe purchases of this item (indicating that they may like it) over 30 days ago (indicating that it may be time for a re-stock) would be most likely to respond to this email.
And by respond… I mean: give you their money!
The other people may buy, but they may also:
- Ignore your email
- Open it, then delete it without clicking through
- Unsubscribe from your list (which is not all bad)
- Report your email as spam (which IS bad)
How Do You Segment?
The more I learn about this, the more powerful I see that it is.
Many email service providers can use data from your store to help segment your list of customers, but I’m a huge fan of the way Klaviyo handles this task.
They integrate tightly with several different ecommerce platforms (like Shopify, WooCommerce, etc), which gives nearly endless ways to segment.
How you approach this is going to depend largely on what type of product you sell and the lifecycle of that product.
It also depends on what kinds of complementary products you have available.
No matter what, you can start by segmenting people into categories based on whether or not they’ve purchased, and how long it has been since they made a purchase.
If you just put this into place, you’ll be well on your way to sending more effective emails.
We’ll help you come up with the best ways to approach your email marketing program, from list management to email copy.
