Let’s make the content inside your newsletter do the best possible job that it can with segmentation.
There are so many opportunities with segmentation that it can feel completely overwhelming and not know where to begin. Plus, how you segment is often software-specific. There were things I learned at Building Brands Live in November from Kate Williams’ talk on Klaviyo that blew my mind.
I’ll come to this in a minute but do go and connect with her on LinkedIn and if you work for a food brand, it’s worth signing up for her newsletter as well.
But let’s start at the simplest level of segmentation that every business should do.
Customer versus audience
If you do nothing else, separate out your customers from everyone else in your database. This is hugely important because you don’t want to put your customers through a sales launch that sells them what they’ve already bought.
If you think they might want to buy again, have that conversation separately.
But I’ve got loads of customers, I want them to buy again 😫
Alright, you’ve got a product-based business. You still need to send different messages to those who have yet to buy your products and those who have already bought.
Let’s say you sell skincare. You know that if someone has already bought your serum, they know how great it is. You’ll want to let them know that they can reorder, get refills, and maybe even get a deal in the sale.
For someone who hasn’t bought it yet, you also need to deal with any objections they have. This might be on quality, price or promise.
You can do this by either:
- Sending two different emails or;
- using dynamic content
What on earth is dynamic content?
Again, this depends on your email software and often the account level you use. I know that Active Campaign limits dynamic content to its higher-paying tiers. You write your content and can change how the block is seen depending on segments or tags.
In Kit, it’s a bit more complicated as you need to create snippets and then use Liquid Code to add variables. This is the same in Drip.
It means you create one email and each person gets something more personal depending on what actions they’ve previously taken, such as making a purchase.
But here is when it gets more complicated.
The more you segment your list, the more data you have and the more personal your emails can become.
This is a good thing because who wants a big generic email that goes out to everyone when you could have content that’s tailored to the things you’re interested in?
Let’s say you love wearing black (I mean, who doesn’t?). Then all the emails you get are from the black collection in your favourite clothes shop. If your favourite colour was blue or pink, you’d get the same email but with those instead.
You can keep digging down into more data and more layers to segment your database and this will get you better results because your readers will think that you’re reading their minds.
This works best when you’re creating sales campaigns but if you have some information about the people on your list, then you can add more personalisation on your newsletters.
So, what’s the best way to collect this data?
I am all for the path of least resistance. You can go big and get your subscribers to fill out forms and reply and do surveys and that’s all good stuff but you don’t necessarily need to do that.
You can build as you go.
Let’s say you send your weekly newsletter as you normally do. You’ve got your regular features and some links to interesting reads on your website. Maybe you’ve got a link to a product.
You can start by tagging people when they click a link. For example, were you to click my SEO Audit link, you’d get a tag on your profile that you clicked that link. Then, when I want to launch something SEO-related, you might get an extra email letting you know that it’s coming and seeing if you are interested or simply being nosey.
Then, let’s say you click that link several times. You can set up fields in a profile to count how many times someone has clicked a link. Again, each software is different in how you’d set this up but if you’ve clicked that link 10 times, I could then send you some helpful content about SEO that might help.
From the content I send, I can make assumptions based on what you click next as to what help you might need. And then I can talk to you about solving that problem for you.
All of this comes from segmenting and tagging.
Basic segments everyone could benefit from
You might already have some of these but if not, think about adding them in:
- Where people found you
- Any lead magnets they’ve downloaded
- Any sales pages clicked
- What they’ve bought
- Personal info like name, business or location.
Beyond this, you might have basic segments depending on your industry, what you sell and, more importantly, what you want to achieve.
It’s not enough to create the personalisation, you also have to use it. You need to be looking at the data to find out what your readers really want from their emails so you can do more of it.
Not all data is correct
There is a word of warning on this that not all data is correct when segmenting by link clicks. Many spam filters will pre-click links to check they are safe. This means your open rates and clicks can be giving you false information.
If you have a solution on what to do about this, I’d love to hear because I’ve yet to find one.
But you will get a feel for who does have this spam filter on and there are ways of building fields to get around it.
For example, you’ve sent an email and you want to track who has clicked the sales page. You have someone with the spam filter so it looks like they’ve opened the email and want what you’re selling. You’d need to first tag or segment them into a group that you’d name something like “Monty Python Fans”.
Then your Monty Python Fans would go into an automation when you send the email. They get a tag for the sales page click. They would also get a field updated if they clicked the same link multiple times. You’d then filter this segment by that field count so you can see who has clicked the sales page and who has likely just got caught in shenanigans on their side.
It’s a bit of a faff but might be worth it.
And that brings me nicely onto the greatest personalisation of all…
Looked not bought
Less for newsletters and more for sales emails but if you have people clicking on your sales pages and they’ve not bought, this is a massive flag for you to do something about it.
You can send them extra emails that say you know they’ve been checking it out and can help.
Or you can personalise one step further and send an actual personal email.
Or go further still and send a video (both Zoom and Teams now have little video message functionality that can do this within your plan so you don’t need to buy more tech).
Taking segmentation to the next level
If you really want to dig into segmentation and see what’s possible, I first recommend Brennan Dunne’s emails. These are brilliant and full of great ideas.
Next, make sure you create a proper system for fields, segments and tags. Get used to how your email system prioritises these. If you’re on Mailchimp, it’s a little faffy. But have naming conventions and a strict way of using them. It will help with future automation to manage your segments or deliver them.
I’ve only scratched the surface of email personalisation here and there is so much more you can do. But start simple and work your way up from there.