For ecommerce businesses, data is the king in the marketing castle. Allowing them to hit the customers they need to with extremely targeted messages to the relevant audience, it’s widely known that segmenting email lists helps businesses to get better open and click-through rates. By narrowing the focus and sending messages to targeted groups within certain lists, recipients will find campaigns more relevant to them. And it’s no secret that relevant campaigns get better results.Here are 4 reasons why segmenting email lists and mailing lists is important.

1. You can track responses more meaningfully

Segmenting lists allows you to more accurately track where sales are coming from. Sending marketing messages to entire email lists ("batch and blast" or "spray and pray") makes it much harder to determine where sales have come from, and as a result, track the return on investment. However segmenting email lists means you can send different messages to different segments and test the response - and the same applies to Direct Mail. This often simply means replicating an initial campaign and subtly changing images and copy (and in the case of Direct Mail it might mean sending some people in different segments the same brochure with a different front and back cover). Making it much easier to track which are working best, segmentation is great for judging ROI, and helping to inform activities going forward.

Example: Live Nation

The American entertainment company owns, leases, has booking rights and equity interest in a large number of U.S. entertainment venues. Instead of just sending mass communication email campaign, they are using location information to provide a customized email experience. Live Nation sends email to their customers about events and venue in their hometowns. This allows them to track the success of their email campaigns, and provide their customers with a more personalised email experience.

Live Nation Targeted email

2. You can target the right audience

Sending out large amounts of Direct Mail is not cheap. Whether it’s paper-based that costs money to create, or time spent creating e-marketing campaigns, direct mail comes at a cost – so you’ll want to make sure you’re getting it right. Getting to know your product and your customer base is essential for ensuring you are making to most of the data you have. Analysing which segments are most likely to respond to particular messages can help to refine campaigns in order to get the best results for the least amount of money.

Example: Uber

Uber breaks down their email lists by state, giving them the opportunity to speak to their users on a more exclusive and local level. The email below is an example of the company’s reactivity. When the transportation service in New Jersey went on strike, Uber used a local approach to encourage people to share their drive using the app. Thanks to their local approach to email marketing, they were able to take a bad situation and turn it into a win-win for both their company and for Uber users.

Uber segmented email campaign

3. You can follow-up cleverly

The results of email and Direct Mail list segmentation can be used to generate sales of follow-up products in order to generate more repeat business in a relevant way. So instead of just offering the same products to all contacts time and time again, segmenting helps you to target those who have already purchased an item with an additional product they may find useful.

Example 1: Dropbox

The file hosting company is famous for its smart marketing email strategy, including follow-up emails. For example after logging in on multiple devices, Dropbox sent this friendly email reminding users of a product feature they didn't know existed. Without much effort, this made users experience using Dropbox infinitely better and more efficient. It also shows Dropbox pays attention to their customers experience.

Drop Box smart follow-up email

By the way - we're by no means affiliated with any of the companies listed in the examples on this page. In fact we use Dropbox and Google Drive for Cloud Storage. If you want to compare Cloud Storage providers you can use sites like Cloudwards to help you compare them to see which time of storage provider is right for your business.

Example 2: Amazon

Yes, we’re referring to Amazon a lot. But what can we say? They are on point when it comes to follow up emails. Before Halloween, when customers looked for pumpkin costumes, Amazon made sure to send a follow-up email with additional recommended products similar to 'full face plastic pumpkin masks'.

Amazon follow-up email

4. You can take advantage of split testing and optimise on the fly

Split testing has become extremely popular in recent years, and segmenting lists means you can take full advantage of it – simply and easily. Allowing you to refine your approach in order to generate more sales, split testing allows you to see first-hand what your target segment is more likely to respond to.

The most important thing to remember is that all your buyers are not the same. What suits one will not suit another, and likewise, what makes one person click through to your website will turn another right off. Dolling out a ‘one size fits all’ campaign is not only a waste, but can also be extremely damaging to companies, causing them to lose potential customers due to irrelevancy. So don’t make that mistake – make the most of segmenting data before it’s too late.

4 reasons why segmenting email lists and mailing lists is important