How to Use Email Segmentation for Smarter Ecommerce

Whitney Blankenship

Content Marketing Manager

Email segmentation is the most powerful way to get the biggest ROI out of your marketing efforts. Though it might seem complicated, it’s actually quite easy to use.

In this article, we’re going to go over:

• What email segmentation is
• Why you should segment your contacts
• Different ways to make email segmentation work for you
• Practical examples of segments you can implement today

By the end of this article, you’ll be segmenting your subscriber list like a pro (and getting more revenue to boot).

What is Email Segmentation?

As long as you have data on it, you can segment your lists for it.

Why Segment my Contacts?

Long story short? Blasting your subscriber list with the same tired message doesn’t work.

Think about it– your email list is made up of individuals, each with their own motivations, interests, shopping habits, etc. They are all unique, and they expect a personalized experience.

So why would you send the same generic message to all of them indiscriminately?

When you use email segmentation properly, three things typically happen:

1. Increased campaign engagement: It’s common sense really. When you send a message that’s more pertinent to a customer, they’re more likely to interact with it. By reducing the amount of subscribers in your segment, you can tailor your messages to better respond to your customer’s needs.
2. Improved customer loyalty and retention: In responding specifically to your customer’s needs, you improve their image of your brand. By personalizing their experience, you show your customer that they matter to you. This helps you create a more profound connection with your customers.
3. Less unsubscribes and spam: When your customer segmentation is done right, your message will always be relevant. Relevant messages are less likely to come off as spammy and unwanted- because you’re giving the customer exactly what they want. This improves your deliverability and domain trust reputation with less emails sent to spam.

Email segmentation allows you to deliver a better overall customer experience. When you can do that, your customer will reward you for it.

5 Advanced Segments for Hyper Targeted Campaigns

When it comes to prioritization, a lot of our ecommerce marketers know the basics of segmenting their subscribers. But when it comes to creating more advanced segments for practical use cases, many marketers lack inspiration.

So I’ve put together 7 of the most practical segments you can create for your online store, with an example of exactly how you can create them yourself.
First, from your dashboard, go to Audience in the top navigation bar. Then go to Saved Segments, then click on the Create New Segment button on the right of the screen.

From this point, you’ll be ready to create these awesome new segments for your ecommerce store.

#1. Segmenting by Sign up Source

Why:

Separating subscribers into segments by their sign up source might seem redundant. However, this allows you to do a few things.
First, you can see which one of your sign up forms brings in the most subscribers. Second, you can create different offers across those forms and see which of those offers resonate the most with your customers.

How:

This is where you luck out. When you use Omnisend, your subscribers are automatically tagged with their source, whether they sign up organically, or they are imported from a file. From this point, you can layer segments on top of this initial segment to get even more precise targeting (more on that later).

What to Send:

What’s interesting about this segment is that you can really tailor your offers to different customers. Instead of starting personalization with your first messages, you can really launch into personalized offers from their first browsing session by targeting your sign up forms, popups, and landing pages to appear to customers interested in certain things.

For example, say you have a sale category on your site. There are customers that will come to your site and directly head for clearance. You might want to hit those customers who are deal-sensitive with a popup after a few seconds to sign up for your newsletter with an extra discount as an incentive.

However, you have other customers that will check out new arrivals and begin looking at your shipping prices. For those customers, you can tailor an offer for free shipping on their first order to sweeten the deal.
From sign up, they’ll already be segmented, so you can automate workflows to send them the codes they’ll need to redeem their incentives for their first purchase.

This is just one way you can start personalizing earlier and offer your customers a truly custom experience.

#2. Segmenting for Customers Who Purchased in the Last 30 Days

Why:

A repeat customer has a 60-70% chance of converting– which means that those who have already purchased from you should be a top priority.
Why does that happen?

Because convincing a customer to purchase the first time means laying groundwork for a lot of trust in your store. As long as you’ve followed through on what you promised them, they’ll have that trust reinforced.
So why not pull them back in while that great experience is still fresh?

How:

In the Omnisend app, add a new segment:

• In Select a Rule Based On choose “Shopping Behavior”
• In Select Criteria, choose “purchased product”
• In Any Time, choose “In the last,” and add “30” days

You can target this even further by choosing exactly which kinds of products the customer would have had to purchase. This way, you can cross sell even better if you offer a variety of different products.

What to Send:

With a customer that’s just recently purchased, there’s quite a bit you can do. For example, if you haven’t already sent a request for a review of the products they bought, this is a great opportunity.

Any followup you send should include personalized product recommendations for items that would compliment what they’ve already purchased. The more personalized they are, the better it will work.

If you can’t segment for personalized recommendations, you can always opt for best sellers that tend to work well with your different segments.

#3. Segmenting for Customers Who Haven’t Purchased in the Last 90 Days

Why:

So we’ve talked about the customers who’ve recently purchased, but what about those who have fallen off the radar?

We know that repeat customers are your most valuable customers. These customers have proven that they’re interested in your products, or they were at one time. If they showed interest at one time, they can do it again.

You’ve just got to find what will be enough to bring them back.

How:

Just like with the previous segment:

• In Select a Rule Based On choose “Shopping Behavior”
• In Select Criteria, choose “purchased product”
• In Any Time, choose “In the last,” and add “90” days

From here, you can begin a great reactivation workflow to bring them back into the fold.

What to Send:

Sometimes, all it takes is a little incentive to bring someone back to an online store. A great reactivation series can be the perfect workflow to bring back an inactive customer.

For example, if you were using lead magnets on your store, like the latest Fall Lookbook for your Autumn apparel, offer that lead magnet as a freebie for your inactive customers. Perhaps a little inspiration is all that’s needed.

That would be a great lead in your reactivation series. You could always follow that up with a limited-time offer for a discount, free shipping, or a free gift with purchase. This will help create urgency for your customer to react, and if nothing else, it’s sure to get a few click throughs and bring your customer back to your store.

Regardless of how well your reactivation campaigns go, clean your list of customers that have not been active for a year or more, meaning they haven’t even opened your emails in that time frame. This will improve your deliverability, and increase the overall quality of your contacts.

#4. Segmenting for Signups that Haven’t Purchased in 30 Days

Why:

Unlike customers that haven’t purchased in 30 days, these are subscribers that have never purchased from you. Obviously, you want to give it time for your welcome automations to work their magic, but you can’t win them all.
This is why you should set up a segment for 30 days after the initial sign up.

This will give you an opportunity to give those subscribers an extra push and transform them into first time buyers.

This will make it easier for you to reconvert them later, once you’ve wow’ed them with your amazing service and products, of course.

How:

When you set up this segment, it will be a bit more involved than some of the others.

• In Select a Rule Based On choose “Email Activity”
• In Select Criteria, choose “been sent campaign”
• In campaign, select your welcome series
• In Any Time, choose “In the last,” and add “30” days

Then you want to click on And to add a set of rules:

• In Select a Rule Based On choose “Shopping Behavior”
• In Select Criteria, choose “not purchased product”
• In Any Time, choose “In the last,” and add “30” days

This will make sure that you segment only those who have already gone through your welcome series in the last 30 days but haven’t purchased. It shouldn’t scoop up regular customers who haven’t purchased in a month, nor customers who’ve also received the welcome campaign but have already purchased.

What to Send:

These customers weren’t swayed by your welcome campaign. They are obstinate in the face of your initial incentives. It’s time to break out a better deal than the one you previously offered.

Because they were interested enough to sign up. They were interested enough to hand over personal information so you can contact them with your best deals. It’s time to rise to the occasion.

Treat these customers like a reactivation campaign. Try different offers to see what sticks the best with them. You can start off in a 3-message series with a look at best-selling product recommendations, but definitely follow up with an offer your customer won’t be able to refuse.

#5. Segmenting for Top Order Value

Why:

In terms of customers, this is the crème de la crème. These are your absolute best, highest spending customers, and you want to keep them around.

So how do you keep the best customers coming back? Rewards. Show your customers that you appreciate them with rewards, gifts, and incentives to keep shopping with you.

The idea is to make it far more advantageous to shop with you over the competition.

How:

There are two different ways you can segment for this depending on what you want to target.

• In Select a Rule Based On choose “Shopping Behavior”
• In Select Criteria, choose “spent on average”
• Set a currency amount to segment customers

You can do it via average spend, or total lifetime spend by swapping out “spent on average” with “spent in total” if you want to target lifetime purchase amount. Both have value to you: a customer may not spend a lot on average, but they might make a lot more purchases overall.

What to Send:

These are you VIP customers, and you should treat them that way. Spoil them with insider looks, prereleases of new products, special rewards, gifts, or anything you want.

The goal is to make these customers feel special and keep them incentivized to shop with you.

Layering Email Segmentation for Best Results

Layering your email segments means you can get super precise when targeting certain customers.

So let’s just say I have a new line of products that I want to target my female shoppers with. All shoppers who made a purchase after November 8th received a special discount to be used for Black Friday weekend.

I create a segment from all my subscribers by filtering only for females. Then I select via shopping behavior to target all women who purchased after November 8th.

I also want to target activated subscribers, so I added yet another criteria for subscribers who had clicked on any campaign sent after November 9th.

I could also choose only the shoppers who clicked on the specific campaign offer I sent after November 9th. I could also create a separate segment for shoppers who didn’t click on that campaign, or didn’t even open it.

This is just an example, but it shows you how you can mix and match your email segments to create ultra precise campaigns.

When you combine the fact that you can create customizable properties for nearly anything you’d like and add that layer of segmentation, the sky’s the limit.

By layering your email segments, you can send extremely personalized messaging. The smaller your segment, the more personalized you can make your campaigns.

Email segmentation is too easy and effective to not use it. While it can seem complex at first, using the right tool to segment your list can make all the difference.

Regardless of the way you use email segmentation to split up your subscribers, it’s all about sending the most relevant message to your customers for a personalized experience.

We know that customers are looking for that- and when you give the customer what they want, they’ll reward you for it.

What are your best email segments? Got any tips I missed? Let me know below!