Look, I know creating your segmentation strategy can feel stressful and seem overwhelming. After all, it seems like there are a million ways to segment your email list.

So, where should you start to segment your email list?

Life-cycle Segments

• Subscribers
• Leads
• Customers

First, let us start with several main segments of your awesome email marketing strategy. Subscribers, leads, and customers are where you should start your segmentation process.

These properties are called your life-cycle stages.

Life-cycle Stage: These are properties that show where your contacts are in your funnel.

Each of these stages shows you where a person is in your funnel. It represents their transition down your funnel.

Your life-cycle segments will allow you to know Who To Email and, just as important, Who Not To Email.

Example: You have an offer you have been selling, well you don’t need to sell your customers again, so you would suppress them. You want to send an email out to your leads and maybe your contacts. Your contacts may need to be nurtured longer before they become a lead to convert to a customer.

Since I brought up your customers, another set of segments you will want is for each of your buyer personas.

Buyer Personas Segments Are awesome foundational segments you’re able to build on.

Remember every business is different and you will more than likely need to create some specific segments for your business.

Every awesome email marketing strategy also has a few segments to monitor the health of your database as well.

Because your database will naturally decay, creating and using these types of segments will allow you to have a sustainable email marketing strategy.

Ways to Monitor the Health of Your Database

• Create a segment list that tracks Who Unsubscribes
• Create a segment list that tracks All Ineligible Contacts
• Create a segment list that tracks Who has a Hard Bounce
• Create a segment list that tracks Who has Not Opened Your Emails for a While

Okay, we have gone over some core segments that you need to create your segments.

Let’s run through an example of how to build a segment of your contacts.

In order to send your targeted emails, you need to create specific segments that will help you bring context to your emails.

An awesome example would be if you put on a webinar, and segment your list to those that Did Attend and those that Did Not Attend the webinar.

This will allow you to do a lot of things like, targeting the language appropriately, sending out a follow-up survey to those that attended, or the recording of the webinar for those that did not attend. Or how about those that filled out the registration form but could not attend, you could also use the same email for those that did not register to attend.

By doing this kind of segmentation, targeting will increase your open rate and click-through rate because it is highly targeted and segmented to people’s behavior.

You are combining together the information that your contacts give you along with their behavior with a piece of content. Thereby creating a personalized and targeted email.

Conclusion

This is just one example of what you can create using segmentation, and there are so many more you can create.

Segmenting your list will keep your email list organized and a sustainable marketing strategy for years to come.

Also, by doing this, your customers will grow along the way, which will help grow your business along the way.