Building an email segmentation strategy will give you the confidants to push the send button every time. You will have created the foundation to ensure you send the right message, to the right person, and at the right time.

 

Courtney Sembler from Hubspot has a framework she fondly calls CATS.

 

C.A.T.S.

• The Right Content
• The Right Audience
• At The Right Time
• Equals Success

 

Did you know that segmented campaigns get 9.37% less unsubscribes, plus 100% more clicks than a non-segmented list do?

 

By segmenting your database, will allow you to have a compellingly awesome impact on your email engagement plus the people you are having a conversation with. It just makes common sense, that the more relevant your information is, the more likely people will be to engage with it.

 

The 3 Best Segmentation Strategies To Put Into Effect:

 

1. Clean & Organized Database
2. Collect and Compile the Right Information
3. Understanding Explicit Data and Implicit Data for Your Segments

 

 

Clean & Organized Database

Caring out this part of your core contact management strategy of a clean and organized database. Will gives you a solid foundation for developing an awesome contact segmentation strategy. By doing this you will see your contact management and segmentation strategy working together.

 

You want your database to work with you not against you, that is why having a clean and organized is so important.

 

Your database should be able to be broken down into three main areas of data.

 

3 Main Piece of data:

1. Contact
2. Contacts Properties
3. Company and Their Properties

 

 

1. Contact

Contact: Any person your business communicates with within doing business. This would include your customers, leads, subscribers, and also including your competitors, employees, partners, basically anyone your business is in contact with.

 

2. Contact Property

Also, each contact has what you call contact properties associated with your contacts. This is additional information on a particular person.

Contact Property: Holds information about a particular person. This could be simple information as in first and last names, and email address plus more in-depth information important to your business like physical address, contacts interest in products, services, even what a contact purchased, etc..

 

3. Company and Their Properties

Last but not least, companies and their properties. You will operate these a lot like your contacts and their properties. The only real thing different is you will send context around who that person works for.

Company and Their Properties: Holds information about a particular group of contacts centered around an individual company. This could be the company’s name, physical address, size, website URL, etc..

 

All of these together make up your database. You now have your segment’s information at the ready.

 

Collecting and Compiling the Right Information

The next step for an awesome segmentation strategy is making sure you are compiling the right information. This means you are collecting the correct information to segment your emails with.

 

In today’s world, there are more ways than you can shake a stick at to collect your contact’s information. You can use chatbots, form submissions on a landing page, and/or even messenger apps, you just need to collect and compile the right data all day every day.

 

Once again, it is very important to your segmentation strategy to collect and compile the right information so you can create contextual conversations within your emails.

The two main pieces of information you want to collect and compile on your contacts are. What kind of buyer persona they are closely related to and where exactly in the buyer’s journey.

 

This is as easy as assigning a buyer personas to a contact that fills out a form. Either by filling out the form themselves and asking them how they would strongly identify themselves or after your contact fills out a specific form related to a type of content you could assign a buyer personas internally.

 

Segmentation of your contacts in this way will allow you to identify where to place your contacts in the buyer’s journey.

 

You will need to analyze the kinds of content your contacts are interacting with and pair them up with one of three stages in the buyer’s journey. That would be awareness, consideration, and the Decision stage, then create segments for your contacts around those types of content.

By collecting all of this information you now have a starting point in creating your segments.

 

Understanding Explicit Data and Implicit Data for Your Segments Explicit data:

Is the information that’s purposely shared between the contact and the business.

This would be the information your contact fills out, whether it be on a landing page, the contact us page, or any other type of form/button pushed (FB messenger), etc..

 

It is the data that your contact is willing to share with your business.

 

Make sure to keep this in mind about your prospects and what they first tell you, it is only the surface of what you can find out about them.

 

Implicit Data:

Is the gathering of information from your contact’s behavior.

 

Contact information, Company information, form submissions, and survey responses are just a few examples of implicit data.

 

Your implicit data will also include email engagement, social media engagement, web analytic history, your conversion data, plus more.

 

Both your explicit data and implicit data are equally important to creating contextual conversations for your contacts in the emails you send.

 

Conclusion

In collecting all of this information on your contacts you will create the foundation for your email segments.

 

Your most successful segments are when you layer your segmentation criteria.

 

The possibilities are just about endless, only limited by the data you have collected.

 

By combining all three, clean and organized database, collecting and compiling the right information, and understanding explicit and implicit data, will allow you to create the foundation for the segments you will create for your emails.

 

Seth Godin once stated, “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories that you tell.”

 

All of the segments that you will create will help you tell the right stories, to the right contacts, at the right time.

 

Now go and start collecting data and telling stories.