Email has always been a low-cost yet effective marketing channel for every website. But as a Magento site owner, have you truly understood how to send a promotion email effectively? In this article, we will show you some tips about segmentation to deliver your promotion campaign successfully.
1. A brief introduction of segmentation in email marketing
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In a sum up, segmentation is the activity where you divide your contact lists into smaller groups of contact sharing one common feature such as location, gender, age, purchase activity and so on. The purpose of it is to send the most relevant content to your customers. You can imagine that VIP buyers purchasing 3 times a month should not receive the same content as someone who hasn’t bought anything in a long time. And about the result of segmentation? According to DMA, segmentation leads to 77% ROI of email marketing.
In the following tips, we will show you some common yet powerful way to segment contact list of a Magento site. We are using MailChimp as our example for segmentation in the article as the segmentation feature is available in both free and paid version of MailChimp. However, other email platforms also provide this tool. Hence, you still can apply this for your campaign.
2. Segmentation in MailChimp for Magento: based on location
One of the most basic segment types in email marketing is based on the location of the recipient. You can take a look at the image below for example.
MailChimp provides lots of options for the location-based segment. You can choose to send email for the customer of specific countries, the specific state or zip code (for the US only). With this kind of segmentation, Magento store owners can easily combine with other shipping policies such as free shipping or one-shipping-fee for all orders. In the time of the promotion campaign, this with be extremely helpful to attract more attention from buyers to your store.
A small tip for using location-based segment is that you can mention the targeted location in the subject line to grasp more of opens. For example, something like “Hey fellow New Yorkers, your exclusive deal just arrived” will be a great choice for an in-store offer to NYC buyers.
3. Segmentation in MailChimp for Magento: based on gender
For the retail store with both gender as the targeted customer, this will be a big help, especially for holiday promotion. You can segment the list into 2 small groups of male and female then adjust the suitable content sending to each group. For example, sending some recommendation of tech and menswear items to male. On the other hand, women would love some suggestion of cosmetic or kitchen supply.
There are 2 ways in Mailchimp to segment based on gender. If your subscribe form already includes gender in it, then you can segment through the Merge Fields. If not, the Predicted Gender feature is there to help.
4. Segmentation in MailChimp for Magento: based on purchase cycle
Do certain customers come to you on a weekly, monthly, yearly, or quarterly basis? Or maybe they just subscribe and have not bought anything yet. Where exactly are they in your sale funnel? Segment your list based on customers’ purchase cycle so you can be exactly right at their point of need. Each Magento store has its sale cycle. Hence, you can choose among these e-commerce options to sort out customers to suit your sale funnel.
We will show an example of the sale-based segment below using Purchase activity and Purchase Date and Spent (Total).
Firstly, we will segment the contacts which have not purchased from you yet. Your email content needs to focus on increasing the engagement and the awareness of them with your Magento store. Or maybe you need a little bit higher promotion to trigger them to buy from your store. One tip are that showing the best-selling and the trial/free category program will attract more this type of contact.
For contacts which are already your customer, segment based on brand engagement is an ideal choice. You can sort out the customers who haven’t shopped from your Magento store in a long time (in this example we take 6 months). This customer also needs more trigger to buy. For example, you can show them the category of new product and offer a special coupon code named welcome back. Let them know that they are not forgotten.
Last but not least, don’t forget to use Spent (Total) to sort out your VIP customer. In this example, we use $1000 to segment the VIP buyers. You can choose an appropriate amount with your business. We all know that our VIP buyers need more favored promotion to keep their loyalty.
5. Conclusion
Segmentation has always been a powerful tool in any email marketing campaign. If used wisely, it will be a big help to the success of your promotion program and rock your sales. If you have any question or want us to write in any specific topic about email marketing, please let us know in the comment section.
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