Improving Your Email Clickthrough Rates with Segmentation

Jul. 08, 2010

Email Clickthrough rates Nobody wants to receive emails that aren’t of interest to them. Non-targeted emails and spam are a common occurrence within the B2B industry and are one of the fastest ways to decrease your email conversion rate. One of the best things you can do to ensure that your emails are going to be relevant for your recipients is to break your email list down into smaller segments for more personalized, targeted campaigns. The more a recipient can associate with the content of an email campaign, the more likely they are to act on it.

How can you get started?

The basis of segmentation involves achieving a better understanding of your subscribers. Segmenting, by definition, requires that you learn what makes your subscribers individuals and how you can group them into subsets. To determine the ways in which you are going to segment your list, you need to do some research into how your product is perceived by different groups. For instance, segmenting by gender is irrelevant, if gender has little to do with how buyers react to your product.

To get started, a good idea is to choose one single attribute to divide up your house list and to then continue to segment into smaller and smaller like-minded groups. A good example of a starter attribute might be, subscription date (older subscribers vs. brand-new ones). Once you’ve done this initial segmentation, then you can further break down these two groups based on more specific attributes like:

Demographics (age, gender, occupation, income etc.)
Geography
Interest-based preferences
Acquisition channel (where did you email subscribers come from?)
Purchasing history (what product lines have they purchased in the past?)
Past email open or clickthrough rate (CTR)
Online behavior
Customer type (repeat, inactive, new etc.)
Event-based
Interest-based preferences (interest preferences chosen by the subscriber during the subscription process)

One of the easiest ways to segment your groups is by activity history. Breaking down your list by subscribers who have acted on an email campaign in the past (read, opened or clicked-through), is an easy way to target your subscribers based on their interest. Once you move into more advanced segmentation you can begin to break these lists of interested subscribers into smaller segments based on which campaigns they interacted with and which they didn’t, to make even more specific target groups.

We know that it sounds a bit complicated, but proper segmentation is actually one of the simplest and easiest ways to create relevant interest from your house list and to increase the CTR for your email campaigns. Our advice is just to start small, and then to slowly graduate to a more in depth complicated segmentation process and remember to always test, to determine which segmentation methods work best for your organization.

Image source: www.emarketer.com

Posted by Amberlie Denny at July 8, 2010 8:00 AM