How to segment your market

Your email readers — your audience — have completely different interests and needs. Which is why you should segment that audience and send each group relevant, valuable, targeted information. Do that and open and click rates will certainly be higher.

We encourage everyone to segment their market. How should it actually be done?

Here are some ways to segment users:

1. Demographic data: gender, job role.
2. Behavioural data: why they bought, what they do with your product, whether they are a free or paying user, how often they buy, what stage of the buying process they are at.
3. Registration date: new versus long-standing customer, and where they sit in the customer lifecycle.
4. Email client data: mobile or desktop client, and when they open or want to receive email.

These are the most basic segmentation dimensions, and the data is not hard to obtain. They naturally carry a lot of assumptions — it is only once the email actually goes out and you look at the responses that the segmentation data sharpens and the hit rate improves. Email costs very little to send, so it is nothing but beneficial to your exploration of segmentation.