We begin discussing the various ways you can segment your lists with the ways you can use gender to your favor. We also talk about the potential reasons not to use gender as a segmentation factor. You can be the judge.

00:22 Andy Shore: Welcome back everybody to Clues for the Clueless Email Marketer, we’re gonna continue focusing on segmentation, and just talking about all of the different ways you can get to know your subscribers and pay attention to what they’re doing so that you can be sending them the best possible email marketing messages. And it can all start with your sign-up forms. We spent weeks talking about how you grow your list. Well, with all those sign-up forms and all of those different touch-points we’ve talked about, the fields you have in those sign-up forms can help you start your segmentation from the very beginning. And the first way we’re gonna talk about is by gender.

01:00 Daniel Miller: So, when somebody fills out a sign-up form, in some cases, when it’s relevant, you may wanna ask what is their gender. This specifically works really well for clothing stores, retail stores, and so forth, ’cause it helps you later on to market to the customer with the specific products that they may be interested in. Now, one thing that I highly recommend is just because somebody said that they were a female don’t just send them clothes that relate to female or articles that are related to female ’cause you never know. It may be a female looking to buy for their partner, something like that.

01:33 AS: It’s 2018, they might just prefer that style of clothing.

01:37 DM: That as well, [chuckle] absolutely. So always make sure to check when you segment for a specific thing. You wanna start slow and kinda get your feet wet and test it out, and don’t go 100% certain on anything before you fully test it.

01:53 AS: Yeah, and aside from the type of products, because Daniel mentioned the reasons why you may not wanna limit the types of things you’re showing to each gender, but it can also come down to the tone of voice you’re using or the language you’re using or how you’re speaking to those people, whether it’s boys or girls that may vary from time to time.

02:13 DM: Absolutely. And even the simple fact of… I mean, pretty much what you said, it’s 2018 and a lot of this is changing. This may be old school still, but even the colors. And like you’re saying, the voice, that can really make a big difference. Also when it comes down to values and what each gender may also stand for. Again, 2018, things are changing a lot. I agree with it, I think that it needs to go this way, it’s long overdue, but let’s focus on email marketing for this podcast. Pretty much going back to… I think what we’re really pushing here is you wanna be as relevant as you possibly can to your subscriber. The more you can do that, the more engagement you’re gonna receive.

02:57 AS: Absolutely. And we’ve given a few different examples and being as woke as we can to this specific topic as we are two white males and having this conversation, but you’ll see if it’s working or not in your reports. And that’s for a conversation much further down the line, but when you’re doing any of these different types of segmentation, you’re gonna see if it’s working. You’re gonna see if the clicks are increasing or decreasing, you’re gonna see if the open rate is working based on the way you’re saying things in your subject line, just like we’re saying. If you wanna try and tailor your text to men or women, you’ll see if that’s working in your results. So, with segmentation, pay attention to if it’s working in your reports and stay tuned ’cause we’re gonna dive deep into that later. But, as we’ve said, gender is the first one we’re gonna talk about. There’s a lot more, but it all begins with the fields you have in your sign-up forms, and it’s as simple as a little check box for male or female if you are gonna do marketing like that, it’s gonna help you get started with segmenting your list. And we’ll catch you next time when we talk about the next type of segmentation that you can start straight from your sign-up forms. Thanks for listening.