Behaviour Analysis through Multiple List Segmentation

Email marketing has proven to be one of the best and efficient tools for marketing in the present times. There are many reasons why businesses are adopting and switching to email marketing as compared to other conventional advertising and marketing sources.
 

One of the biggest reasons is the cost effectiveness of marketing through emails and its everlasting popularity.
 

Now that you’ve already selected email as a marketing tool, the next line up of events includes creating a well designed campaign and sending it to your audience.
 

You own a list of people who subsequently subscribe to your business and opt to receive your emails.
 

You may have a different type of customers in your email list. The likes, dislikes, habits, genders, interests, and hobbies of these people might be different or similar.
 

Now if you send a single email to all these customers without even knowing who’s interested in what, you will end up losing a lot of customers. This is where email segmentation comes to play.
 

According to the statistics by DMA, 77 percent of the email marketing ROI comes from segmented and well targeted campaigns.
 

So, if you are all set to segment your email list, there are tons of ways by which you can do so. All you have to do is collect as much information about your email recipients as possible and send them innovative and effective campaigns.
 

With segmentation, you can perform a behavioural analysis of your customers and improvise them in your existing strategies.
 

Here are the best ways by which you do so:
 

For example, consider Valentine’s day, when chocolates, other sweets, and flowers sell the most. Similarly, confectionaries sell the most during when there is a party.
 

This shows that the customer is inclined to buy a specific product during a certain period of time. You can use this fact to segment your customer on the basis of their particular behaviour and buying tendency.
 

Consider the case of Hallmark cards that targeted this situation and presented cards that are right for every occasion. It not only gained the customer’s trust but also analyzed the particular behavior of the audience.
 

You can also analyze the behaviour of your customer by letting the customer go through the process of what is known as ‘self-segmentation’.
 

Sometimes customers do not want too many emails from your business; on the other hand, some customers might also want regular emails regarding your products and services.
 

For you as an entrepreneur, it is a difficult task to decide how to manage the sending frequency for these people. Instead of making assumptions, it’s better to ask your customers about it and then segment them in multiple lists according to the frequency of receiving your emails as desired by them.
 

Because there is no perfect sending frequency. See how Modcloth asks subscribers their preferences:
 

Knowing the location of your customers can help you understand a lot of key factors for analyzing the behaviour of your customer.
 

Consider that if you are a national franchise, you would want to segment your email list by your customer’s zip code so that you do not end up infringing the wrong territory or region.
 

This type of segmentation will also save you from marketing to a location where your company does not provide services yet. You can analyze your customer’s behaviour based on their location as it’s evident that people belonging to a particular geographical region tend to like similar kind of things.
 

You can utilize this segmentation opportunity by creating location-specific subject lines. Consider the geographically segmented email by Vamoose
 

Image source: blog.hubspot.com
 

One of the most basic and important elements that you can use to create a segmented email is age, gender and persona. A persona includes the likes, dislikes, and habits of students.
 

If your campaign targets both young and old people, it might seem easy to analyze their behaviour patterns. At the same time, you can modify your existing campaign based on these facts.
 

For example, consider the campaign by Fit For Me that replaces the image in the email header depending on the segmented list.
 

Image source: emailonacid.com
 

Similarly, segmentation on the basis of genders can help you analyse the behaviour of a particular type. Just like you cannot speak to a college student and a grandfather, in a same manner, you can adjust your messages and information according to genders and buyer personas too.
 

The level of education of customers might vary in your email list. You can consider this as another great opportunity to analyze the behaviour of your customer by segmenting your email list based on the number of degrees your customers hold.
 

Segmenting your lists this way can provide you an edge over others, as you will get to know the level of understanding that your customers have about your content. And you can use it well by nurturing your content accordingly.
 

Understanding the behaviour of your customer is essentially important if you want to achieve success for your email marketing campaign.
 

A segmented approach can serve as the main ingredient in this entire process of customer behaviour analysis. By this approach, you not only understand different patterns of customer behaviour but also implement fruitful changes in your business that cater best to the needs of the market.
 

Ultimately, this approach will provide clarity to your customers and an edge to your business over others, in the market.