Council Post: Four Powerful Ways To Segment Your Email Leads

By Chris Christoff, the co-founder of MonsterInsights, the leading WordPress plug-in for Google Analytics.

Are you interested in getting more value from your email marketing strategy? If you’re like most business owners and marketers, the answer is a resounding yes! We all want to keep our subscribers engaged and turn them into lifelong customers, but that’s often easier said than done. 

You can make countless tweaks to your email strategy, but none are quite as powerful as customer segmentation. Essentially, segmenting is when you separate your leads based on their unique interests, goals and pain points. 

The ability to hone in on what each customer wants and needs will help you personalize emails for your subscribers, which is crucial for eCommerce success in 2022. Once you’ve spent enough time segmenting your leads, you can create unique campaigns that are designed to boost clicks, engagement and conversions. 

Today, I want to share several ways business owners and marketers can segment their leads and turn more subscribers into highly engaged, happy customers. 

Let’s dive in! 

1. Include optional questions on your sign-up form. 

Believe it or not, you can start segmenting new leads before they finish filling out your email sign-up form. One way to do this is by including several optional questions that users can answer before clicking the submit button. 

We use the answers to these questions to automatically segment our leads, which makes it easy to plan future emails. 

If you want to know what kind of questions you should ask, I suggest reviewing your buyer persona sheets. Odds are, you have several different types of people who visit your site for specific products and services. For instance, a pet store may have an entire subset of customers who only purchase products for cats. 

Use your blog content, product selection and Google Analytics data to determine the needs of your various personas. In the example I used above, the marketing team could simply ask new subscribers what type of pet they own. If users say they own cats, they can automatically get segmented into the appropriate list. 

You’ll want to limit yourself to one to three questions to avoid form abandonment and boost your sign-up rate. 

2. Use your welcome email to ask for preferences.

Let’s say a user decided not to fill out your optional questions. Your next move should be to use your welcome email to ask users to select their preferences. Welcome emails are an essential part of every email marketing strategy. Failure to immediately reach out to new subscribers could lead to visitors forgetting you exist, which isn’t good for business. 

The advantage to asking for preferences in the welcome email is you can get a little more detailed than you would on a contact form. Since the new subscriber already showed interest in your brand, it’s safe to assume that they’ll want to tell you what kind of emails you should deliver to their inbox. 

You’ll be happy to know that even if you’re reading this after building your list, it’s not too late to ask subscribers to share their preferences. In fact, I like reaching out to existing subscribers at least once a year to ask if they would like to change the types of emails they receive from our business. After implementing this strategy, we saw our unsubscribe rate plummet and our click-through rate soar. 

3. Create segment-specific lead magnets. 

Next, let’s talk about using lead magnets to segment your audience. Lead magnets are essentially pieces of content or promotions on your site that are designed to entice users to join your email list. 

For instance, when a business offers you 20% off your first order for subscribing, that’s a lead magnet. Similarly, long-form content like complete online courses, PDF guides and infographics also act as powerful lead magnets. 

When you create content and promotions for your site, think about which segment of your audience will most likely take you up on your offer. If we go back to our previous pet store example, I can show you what I mean. 

Let’s say the marketing team at this company put out a PDF guide about taking care of new kittens. When a user clicks the download button and subscribes, you can automatically segment them into the list of cat owners based on the context of the lead magnet. 

4. Track user engagement and behavior.

Finally, let’s look at how user engagement can help you segment your email list. The people who join your list will likely continue engaging with your business for a while after they join. You can use these interactions to further segment subscribers and amplify your personalization strategy. 

So, if a shopper starts buying one type of product but pivots to another unrelated product, you could segment them by sending content and offers relevant to the new product they purchased. 

You should think about segmenting leads that stop engaging with your emails. For example, we have a campaign that we send to subscribers after they go six months without opening an email from our brand. If used properly, these types of emails can help you re-engage your subscribers and match the content they receive with their specific goals and interests. 

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to segment your email leads and get more value from future campaigns. The advice offered here today are all tried and true strategies that we’ve used to curate content for our leads for the past several years. You can apply these tips to your strategy and properly segment new and existing email subscribers regardless of industry.