Email Marketing Solutions

I’ve received a handful of emails that were so personalized, I did a double-take thinking that they may have been sent only to me.

And I’m an email marketer. I know what goes on behind the scenes.

So how do you think most people feel when they receive a personalized email from a favorite brand or big name influencer?

Email is the ultimate one-to-one marketing channel that you can use to grow your business.

But too often emails are not personalized. They aren’t written to one person. 

They are written in a one-to-many format. 

Why?

Because the list isn’t segmented. And the email is going out to EVERYONE!

It’s almost impossible to send a highly personalized email when you are mailing to everyone on your list.

So today, let’s break down how to personalize your email strategy with segmentation.

Basics – Engaged vs Unengaged

Sending to your entire list is like playing pin the tail on the donkey.

Not only are you closing your eyes, hitting send, and hoping that your message resonates with some people on your list…

You also look like an a$$ to everyone who’s not on your list.

Nothing turns me off from an email like being lumped into a group that I am clearly not a part of.

But before we can get too detailed with segmentation, we need to start with two basic segments.

Engaged and Unengaged. 

You can do this with ANY email platform, but I’m going to be focusing on the steps to do this in Klaviyo today.

Your conditions can vary here, but I typically want to capture anyone who’s engaged with email in the last 3 months, engaged on your website in the last month, joined a list in the last two weeks, or purchased something in the last 6 months. (That last condition can vary greatly depending on what you sell. For consumables I would shorten that time line and for speciality products or high ticket products I would extend that time line.)

Also, make sure to include only people who are NOT suppressed for email using the AND command. This will give you an accurate count of how many people are in your segment.

Make sure to use the OR condition when setting up your engaged segment.

Your engaged segment is essentially your warm to hot audience. This segment includes people who are actively engaged and looking at your products.

People who are on this list but HAVE not purchased yet are as warm as they can get.

And people who are on this list and have purchased in the past are your hottest customers. Remember, it’s always easier to get someone to purchase a second time than to purchase for the first time.

Then do the exact opposite for your Unegaged segment, but use AND not OR.

Still include anyone who is NOT suppressed for email.

This unengaged list is your cold audience. They may have purchased in the past (in which case you could make an argument that they are lukewarm) but they aren’t ready to purchase.

They need to be re-engaged before trying to make a sale.

How To Utilize Your Engaged Segment

If you do NOTHING else, creating and sending to your engaged segment will have multiple benefits…

>>Allows you to create messages specifically for your Ideal Customer Avatar (ICA)

>>Improves your deliverability score – meaning more emails land in the inbox

>>Increases total opens, clicks, and revenue

Your engaged segment should be your default segment for most emails.

Make sure you are sending to your engaged segment at least once per week. This will allow you to continue tracking engagement and will keep your segment updated. 

It’s really hard to determine who’s engaged when you aren’t sending regular emails.

Basic emails that you should be sending to your engaged segment…

1. Flash sales, special promotions, limited deals
2. Monthly newsletters – what’s going on with the company/brand
3. New product launches or back in stock emails
4. Special day emails (either national holidays or “special” holidays – i.e. National Hot Tea Day)

A Word On Your Unengaged Segment

It may be tempting to email your unengaged segment to try and get more sales…

But it’s in your best interest to ignore this group, for now.

See you can re-engaged your unengaged audience, but it’s like trying to convert on cold traffic when you aren’t sure that you can land in their inbox.

So… when you’re ready to try and re-engage this audience, be very careful.

Avoid ANY spammy language. You might be able to get away with certain words and phrases when sending to your engaged segment, but you’re going to be limited when emailing your unengaged subs.

Pay extra attention to your subject lines. 

You should always spend extra time developing subject lines. They are one of the biggest levers you can pull to improve email performance. But for your engaged segment, subject lines aren’t as important.

Because your engaged segment is already looking for your emails and have interacted with them in the past.

Remember though, that your unengaged segment is cold traffic. So your subject line needs to GRAB their attention.

Curiosity works great. Open loops are necessary. Make them HAVE to open.

Try to re-engaged slowly. Once you’ve build up your deliverability scores and your landing in the inbox regularly for your engaged segment, you can begin to experiment with re-engaging your unengaged segment.

Just don’t try and do it all at once.

Eventually, you can develop a sun-set or win-back flow to try and re-engaged this segment. But that’s not an immediate problem to solve.

5 Additional Segments You Should Utilize

Here are 5 more segments that you should create and what emails you should send them.

>>Engaged but no purchase

Send emails with customer testimonials, product benefits, and special discount codes for first purchase.

>>Engaged with one purchase

Send cross-sale and up-sell emails (can segment further based on product purchased), review gathering emails, directions for use (how to get the most out of the product), and time to restock emails.

>>Engaged with multiple purchases (VIP)

Send special discount or early access deals, and personalized letters from the founder/president emails.

>>Male vs female segments

You can create this segment one of two ways. Klaviyo has a predictive analytics feature that can help you create a male vs female segment. OR my preferred route would be collecting this information via your popup or an email campaign.

Men and women have different shopping preferences and habits and you might have different lines of products in your store that appeal to the different sexes.

>>Product specific segments

When you create product specific segments based on what someone has bought, added to cart, or viewed, it allows you to send hyper-specific emails about that product or product line and you can send cross-sale and upsell emails based on that interest.

3 More Advanced Segments To Use

• Segment based on a particular item for cross-sale purposes
• Location based segmentation
• Multiple engagement segments
• Nearly there segment
• Holiday shoppers segment

When you’re ready to get really granular with your segments, here are five more to utilize:

>>The highly engaged segment

These subscribers have clicked on recent emails or been active on site in the last week. They are super engaged with your brand. If you split this up into non-purchasers and prior purchasers, you can send targeted emails that get really good results.

>>The nearly there segment

This is a spin-off of the first segment. This group is highly active, have not purchased, and have viewed a particular product in the last week. They just need a little more push. If you have a browser abandonment flow in place, you could add onto that flow with emails that target only the readers who are highly active.

>>Location based segment

Maybe you need a group of local readers that you can send specific offers or emails to. Or maybe there’s a particular location that you want to exclude because it’s hard/expensive to ship there.

Klaviyo has the power to create location based segments based on a user’s IP address. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty powerful.

Next Steps

• Send me a message or fill out this form if you’re looking for someone to help you with segmentation or email management.
• Connect with me on LinkedIn for more insights into best email practices.
• Check out my website for additional blog articles and email breakdowns.

And let me know if you got some value out of this. Are you already utilizing these flows? Any ones that you think I missed?