If the title of the article caught your interest, then it’s a good sign! Already know you have problems to solve or opportunities to improve! What I have seen over many years working with email marketing is that there is a pattern, a line of thinking of who has a mailing list. And believe me, this happens even in large companies.
No one has doubts that email marketing is a channel that has a return, that is, the cost is low compared to the results that can be obtained in e-commerce or any other area of business. However, it is thought that the larger the list and the more e-mails you send, the better will be the result.
This thought could not be more wrong! It’s the same thing as advertising on all mailboxes!
If you read on, you’ll find out why …
Whether you have 50 or 50 million contacts.
Whether you have your contacts in an excel list and still send them via Gmail or Hotmail (if you still not doing it …) or have a properly organized and sanitized list. In any of these scenarios …
This article is for you. And in the end, you will know:
Contents
What types of targeting?
There are two major types of targeting:
Data targeting
Here you can divide people into groups based on information such as city, region, gender, age, shipping frequency, date of purchase, anniversary date, the category of products purchased, the number of orders placed, etc.
Anyway, the more information, the better.
Behavioral targeting
In this type of segmentation, what counts is the interaction of the people concerning the emails sent by you. For example: who opens more or never opened the emails, who else clicks the buttons that lead the user to another page, among other criteria.
This way you can, for example, resend emails to users who for some reason did not open the email.
Why segment a list?
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, the general thought is that sending lots of emails means having better results, which is not true.
It may sound cliché, but reaching your audience should be by best practice: sending the right message to the right audience at the right time, according to the preferences and even, for example, or your person.
Within a database, there are entirely different profiles: different preferences, the regions where they live, and the most opportune moments of purchase, among other criteria.
Tendo sido pai de uma menina há pouco mais de 6 meses eu não gostaria de receber emails de roupa para um menino nem tão pouco de tamanhos para crianças que já têm 5 anos.
Assim como não faz sentido que eu receba emails com máquinas de lavar roupa no dia seguinte a eu ter comprado uma.
In these very different examples and so many other cases, the segmentation was not well performed, so people end up losing interest. But the consequence of (i) the relevance of these communications is not based solely on removal.
There are many cases where the dissatisfaction is such that instead of removal, what the recipients do is mark as spam or even complain to the CNPD, which can affect their delivery and consequently the performance of their campaigns. At the limit, they may also involve fines, depending on how the consent of the people on your list was obtained.
More common targeting issues and how to resolve them
As you use an email marketing service such as E-goi, it is natural (and recommended) that you want to send different messages to different audiences (e.g., a message for contacts in one city, another for those in another city, etc.). .) but also that you want to solve some problems in the management of your database, for example, duplicate contacts.
The traditional way of doing this targeting is to create several different contact lists, but in E-goi it is possible to use a single list organized by segments or tags.
Thus, the management of contacts and messages becomes much simpler and more effective. Therefore, you avoid, for example, sending repeated emails to duplicate contacts in your lists.
If you are not yet an E-goi customer, to create this and any of the targets listed below merely create an account here.
The process is simple:
- Go to the “Lists” menu and click “Contacts” from the list where the contacts you want to move are.
- On the contacts page, select the contacts you want to move (by ticking the box next to each).
- Click on “Operations” (at the bottom of the page). In the window that appears, click on “Move”, choose the list where the contacts will be moved and confirm the operation. Remember that for security, after moving the contacts, you can not move them back to the source list or to any list where these contacts have already been moved;
The best (and simplest) ways to segment your contact lists + Best practices
Target contacts by city
If the database you imported into E-goi has a “city” field that was associated with a field with the same name in E-goi, just go to “What do you want to search for?” in the contact list, click on “All fields”, and choose “City” (in the “Extra fields” area). Then write the name of the city you want, click “Apply” and save the segment.
To create segments for other cities, repeat the process. This type of filtering is ideal, for example, for group shopping sites or group purchases, as the offers are usually different depending on the city of each subscriber.
If you have other fields in your database (e.g., “Customer type”, “Preferred products”, etc.) and you want to target based on them, you can use this same method. You only need to choose this field instead of the “City” field.
Reward your biggest fans
In addition to targeting your list by data field, you can also aim it by statistics, which is great for, for example, rewarding people who click and share the emails you send them! Just go to “What do you want to look for?” in the contact list, click “All fields”, choose “Clicks” (in the “Statistics” area), choose “greater or equal”, type “1” and keep “All campaigns”. Then click “Apply.”
After a few moments, E-goi will show all the contacts who clicked on your emails one or more times. Do you want to add to this filter also all those who shared on Facebook?
Easy, click “Add another condition” to the right of the filter you created for clicks, and a new filter will appear below it. Click “All fields”, choose “Social sharing”, choose “greater or equal,” type “1”, choose “Facebook” and keep “All campaigns.” Confirm that you change the “E” option to “Or” and click “Apply.”
E-goi will then show the contacts who clicked on your emails or shared the content. Save this segment and use it later to send these people a special gift! 🙂
Segment who did not open any emails + Recovery contacts “sleeping”
The fewer people open their emails, the worse their delivery effectiveness in the future mailings, so it is always advisable to isolate contacts who never open their emails.
To do this, go to “What do you want to look for?” in the contact list, click on “All fields”, choose “Open e-mails” (in the “Statistics” area), keep “equal”, write “0” and keep “All campaigns”. Then click “Apply.”
E-goi will then fetch all contacts that have never opened any emails. Record this segment and use it to try to recover those “sleeping” contacts.
Send an SMS to contacts who have not opened your email
If the contact database you have imported into E-goi has not only the email address of each contact but also the mobile phone, E-goi can send an SMS only to people who do not open the email.
Start by sending your email generally to the desired contacts. 24 hours later, go to “What do you want to look for?” in the contact list, click “All fields”, choose “Open e-mails” (in the “Statistics” area), keep “equal”, type “0” and choose the email campaign you have sent. Then click “Apply.”
E-goi will show the contacts that did not open that particular email. Save this segment and use it to send only those people an SMS with a summarized version of the message you sent by email.
Not only will it maximize the chances that the message will be read (the percentage of reading SMS is much higher than that of email), it will save you the costs of sending SMS, as it will not be necessary to send it to the entire contact list!
Tag contacts
Tags are by far the simplest and fastest way to segment a database. If you want, for example, to rank a valuable customer or send an offer only to some contacts, give them a tag with the name of the offer!
In E-goi, you can insert tags:
- in a single contact (edit the contact, go to “Tags”, write the word with which you want to classify it and save the change).
- in multiple contacts at the same time (choose them from the contact list, click on “Operations” at the bottom of the page, add the tag and apply the change). If you want to insert tags in all the contacts that are in a segment, load it and apply the same method.
- on the subscriptions made by a certain form or questionnaire (go to the options on the form and add the tags that you want to associate with the contacts you subscribe to automatically).
- in contact imports (during import, open the options and insert the tags).
- in an automatic action sequence (just put an “Add tag” action anywhere in the sequence, and E-goi automatically handles the rest!);
To send a campaign to only those who have a specific tag, go to “Segment” (when publishing the campaign), choose the desired tags and send it!
After you add tags, you can also efficiently manage tags.
The massive advantage of tags is to simplify the organization of a contact list. It is handy for making highly segmented submissions according to the profile of each contact — no hassle or confusion with Excel fields and documents.
Case study
Do you want to reach your audience assertively? So you need to work out your buyer persona.
Here at E-goi, we’re obsessed with targeting and improving the results of our campaigns.
There was a time when the level of optimization was such that there were no significant improvements to make that would significantly impact our results. That’s when we decided to leave to identify our people.
After identifying our personas, a strategy was defined that would deliver relevant content according to states of consciousness of each of these people.
Using the goals of track and engage we managed to map the articles of our blog made for these personas and “feed” our database with this segmentation.
Knowing what kind of persona we have also managed to include the pages visited our site that may interest those people in the segments.
Some people are receiving our content that has more than 30 targeting criteria!
In general, the opening rates have consistently increased from 10 to 15% and with the knowledge of each of the people to be deepened as they interact with our contents it is normal for the segmentation to become more assertive and that these results will increase.
Conclusion
Whether you’re just getting started or already at a level where you can jump to more advanced targeting, one thing’s for sure: Segmenting your list is always a good idea, is not it?
Apply the tips we suggest and tell us what your results were!