Increasing your ROI with Email Segmentation

I have just spent the last half an hour unsubscribing to emails received from my favourite brands. It’s not that I’ve fallen out of love with these brands. In fact, these emails are well designed, beautifully written and they’re even optimised for mobile (so far so good), but unfortunately the content is completely irrelevant to me. Emails about garden furniture (we live in a flat), children’s bicycles (grew out of those a while back) and holidays to the Maldives (if only!)… the list goes on! It feels like my inbox is constantly clogged up with emails that are of no interest and that have no relevance to me – I don’t have the urge to open them let alone click through from them. In fact, the only urge I do have is the complete opposite, as I sit here now, I would rather unsubscribe than be constantly bombarded with communications so impersonal to me.

And seemingly, it’s not only me that feels like this. More and more consumers are being turned off by email communications that aren’t relevant to them. In a recent study, 41% of consumers said that most emails they receive from brands don’t contain anything that interests them [i].  And research shows that one out of four customers deleted an email, simply because the message didn’t seem relevant enough to them personally [ii]. It has become apparent that sending a generic email to the whole of your database is increasingly less likely to generate a response and if anything, is likely to do more harm than good as consumers expect more.

If this is the case, and with email marketing being at the forefront of most integrated campaigns, why is it that so many brands still insist on sending out generic emails? More and more brands are starting to appreciate the importance of segmentation in their email communications but there are still many that haven’t taken the time to do so.

If you are unsure as to why you should be segmenting your data and sending out more targeted communications, here are a few reasons why this is vital in order to deliver successful email marketing campaigns [iii]:

1. You will achieve better open rates – 39% of marketers who segmented their email lists experienced higher open rates.
2. Fewer recipients will unsubscribe – 28% of marketers who used segmentation experienced lower unsubscribe rate.
3. Improved deliverability – 24% of marketers who employed segmentation techniques experienced better deliverability and greater revenue.
4. You are more likely to achieve better click-through rates – Recent research [iv] suggests personalised emails improve click through rates by up to 14% and conversion rates by 10%.
5. Your email database is made up of many different people – It’s important to remember that the audience you are targeting have different desires and needs. For example, a hotel brand targets a range of people from families to business travellers. An email promoting discounted family rooms would not be relevant to those who only travel alone on business.
6. Increased relevancy – when the content within an email is relevant to the recipient, they are much more likely to respond to it in a positive way.
7. Your brand reputation will improve – When you send out emails that have relevant content to the recipient, your brand is perceived in a more positive light. Your email recipients will feel more engaged, and more valued and will be encouraged to open emails they receive from your brand, as they know that the content will be interesting to them. 

All of the above will help to achieve the desired result of increasing return on investment, the ultimate goal for marketers. It’s clear to see from the above that brands who are able to send genuinely relevant communications clearly have a great advantage over competitors who don’t.

The good news is that these days, it’s not difficult to start making improvements to the data that you currently hold to achieve these results. With new technologies available, such as the LAW Automated Marketing Platform (AMP) we use here, brands are able to segment their data in a sophisticated way, so that they are able to profile their audience intelligently. This enables them to create powerful personalised email campaigns for all profiles held within a database.

Data can be segmented in a million different ways. Common ways of segmenting are by geography, by age, by gender, by interests. However, the segments used all depend on the objectives of the individual brand and the nature of the business. The more intelligent the segmentation, the better the overall results achieved.

In today’s fast paced world where you have a split-second to capture your target audience’s attention, it is imperative that you are dissecting your email database into a number of intelligent segments, and then tailoring the content in each of them to the recipient. You could spend your yearly marketing budget on creating beautifully designed email campaigns with engaging copy, but if the content is not relevant to the recipient, your return on investment will never realise its full potential.

Brands and marketers alike need to be aware that consumers are becoming less tolerant of unintelligent communications and that sending the right message, to the right person at the right time is vital to ensure that email campaigns are effective. A report stated that 52% of marketers [v] still have a great need to improve email database segmentation. Are you one of them?

If you would like advice on how email segmentation can benefit your brand, resulting in better engagement with your consumers, or you would like to find out more about how LAW AMP could help you achieve a better return on investment, don’t be shy, come and talk to us today.

Information Index

[i] Forrester Study
[ii] Econsultancy.com
[iii] Lyris, Inc
[iv] The Aberdeen Group
[v] MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report