If you’ve been an email marketer for more than about ten minutes, you are certainly no stranger to the necessity to segment your email subscription lists in order to obtain the best possible results from your campaign. However, you may be finding yourself a bit stultified and flummoxed by the prospect of having to come up with some new and different criteria to apply to your segmentation efforts. In that case never fear as all you need to do is check out some of these top five segmentation strategies in order to implement them into your list management duties and presto, you’ll be a segmentation star!
1. Evangelists – An extremely lucrative segment of your entire email marketing list is the customers who love your brand so much that they have become advocates and evangelists for you. These people spend a part of their valuable time in talking up your brand to their social media circles, and thus they deserve far more than your conventional email content. This is the segment that you should definitely splurge on, with incentivized offers for loyalty programs, discounts and special offers which they receive when they refer any of their friends, and even special sneak peeks into upcoming products and services.

2. Changers – You may have long time customers which suddenly demonstrate a drastic shift in buying patterns. Perhaps they were spending a thousand dollars on your site in the run up to each holiday season and the last one was fifty bucks, or maybe they went the opposite way and started buying up your offerings as if you were running a fire sale. Either way, these subscribers deserve your attention with special email content. The customers which seem to be fading away could possibly be brought back to their previous buying volumes with valuable offers targeted directly to their previous purchasing behavior, while the ones who have shown significant increase in ordering might be encouraged to buy more if they receive considerable incentives and even volume discounts.

3. Timers – An inordinate amount of valuable information on the level of interest that your subscriber has in your brand may be gleaned simply through the determination of how long they have actually paid attention to your content. If they have clicked onto your webinar or podcast and then fled within 60 seconds, then you can be fairly confident that you are not capturing their hearts and minds. However, if they have stayed engaged until the end of the entire 45 minute duration, you can bet that these are customers which you can count on to have a marked level of brand loyalty and interest. By determining just how interested your subscribers are in your brand’s content you’ll be able to deliver them the email content that will best engage them.

4. Seasonals – There are some customers who are strictly seasonal purchasers and when you are able to identify those patterns you can certainly put them to good use. The ultimate seasonality is the one surrounding placing presents under the Christmas trees, but there are as many seasonal patterns to customer purchasing as there are calendar events tied into specific product and service offerings. Is your tech customer only buying between Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Is your beach lover only ordering in June? No matter what the seasonal behavior you can motivate your customer to consider out-of-season ordering by providing them with email content which demonstrates the value you can provide at times other than their favorite buying season.

5. Crazies – Yes, you read correctly… the crazies. These are the subscribers who you can’t seem to figure out as they don’t seem to show any sort of pattern at all. They buy when they feel like it, jump around among your offering categories, and generally act like they have a randomizer in their craniums. Instead of pitching everything including the kitchen sink at them, provide email content which directs them to your more lucrative categories and you might see a dollar value jump in their ordering.

There are countless criteria for segmentation, but try these out and you may be pleasantly surprised.