How to Cast a Spell on your Email Marketing with Websand’s Email Segmentation Wizard

How to Cast a Spell on your Email Marketing with Websand’s Email Segmentation Wizard

It’s Friday night. You’ve logged into Netflix and you’re in the mood for a movie. Now, imagine the video streaming giant has thrown all its titles into one list. You only want the horror films but now you’re scrolling through musicals and family comedies. The recommendations feature goes on strike. You get emails about films you have no interest in.

You won’t be happy.

That’s what an unsegmented list is. Chaos and mixed messages.

We’ve talked about the importance of segmentation before. And it’s not only us.

Segmented emails enjoy open rates 14.32% higher than non-segmented emails. Even better, segmented click-throughs are 100.95% higher than regular campaigns.

Segmentation lets you deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

It’s the driving force behind permission marketing. So using our opening example, say we’re Netflix. We get users to tell us their preferred genres when they sign up for the service. When we send viewing recommendations, it’s based on what we know they already like.

We wouldn’t send notifications about thrillers to fans of romcoms.

Your email marketing is no different. Segmentation is the fastest method for grouping your subscribers. It makes it easy to send them the content they need.

It works well with automation too. Need to remind customers their product is about to run out? No problem. Set up a trigger that emails these customers in the specified time frame. Only those customers will receive the email. So you don’t annoy customers who only buy one of your other products.

But how on earth would you set up something so specific? I’m so glad you asked.

Enter the Websand Email Segment Wizard.

The Websand platform offered the New Segment option. This lets you choose from a range of presets to create your segment. It also includes the ‘freestyle’ option if you like mixing things up. Or if you have a more specific set of criteria for your segments.

Now we have the Segment Wizard, which lets you take the freestyle option to the next level.

Here, you get an overview of your data and pull together different segments based on a wider range of rules. You can create deeper queries, and you even get better visibility of your data.

And as we know, Websand is all about the data.

So how do you use the Segment Wizard?

The wizard walks you through the steps you need to follow to create a segment.

First, select People, Transactions or Email Events as a data source for the segment.

‘People’ allows you to base your data on your audience’s profile information. So you can create complicated segments based on the data you’ve collected about your audience.

‘Transactions’ focuses on the information generated by your audience’s behaviour. Purchases and so on would appear here.

‘Email Events’ covers how your subscribers interact with your campaigns or automated emails.

For this post, we’ll start with People.

As you might imagine, this takes your subscribers as your starting point.

Here, you can break down your subscribers by different fields. Think of source, first name, company, etc. These allow you to identify data you hold on your subscribers.

Or you can hit Match All and put everyone in the segment. Which doesn’t make it a very helpful segment.

The headings in the box on the right allow you to see this data breakdown. If you click on ‘source’, you can see how many people signed up from each specified source.

That’s useful if you drive sign-ups via the Websand plugin for Wordpress. Here, you can see where subscribers signed up from on your website. You can create segments for specific blog posts, or parts of your site, like landing pages.

The source can also include direct sign-ups or promotions you’ve run. It’s important to know where subscribers came from. That way, you can tailor what you send according to what they’re interested in. The source is unique to each subscriber, much like their interests.

But here we don’t only want to use the source. We also want to use their subscriber status. For demonstration purposes, we only want to target lapsed subscribers.

Our segment will only comprise subscribers labelled as lapsed who signed up via a landing page.

We can use elastic search to find these subscribers to put in a segment.

Elastic search involves the same terms you’d use in Google.

Enter “landing page” in the Text Search box. Add quote marks so it searches for the entire phrase since the term is two words. We’re combining subscribers from different fields, so you’ll also need to enter + lapsed.

This is why it’s a good idea to keep your data in separate fields.

Next, the wizard asks you to refine your date options.

You can pick up everyone that meets the criteria by using ‘All Time’. If you have a specific date range in mind, you can enter that here too.

Or you can use the Relative option, which gives more choice. The Relative option allows you to create segments based on a specific action. This action occurred relative to the time you’re creating the segment. Confused?

Look at it this way. When did something happen or when will it happen?

Most actions will have happened in the past. The subscriber signed up or bought a product. But some actions will happen in the future, like contract end dates or hotel bookings.

We want subscribers who signed up between 7 and 21 days ago. Under Start date, type ‘now-21d/d’. This says you only want it to start considering subscribers who signed up 21 days ago from this moment.

Under End date, enter ‘now-7d/d’. Someone who subscribed yesterday won’t appear. Or you could enter ‘now+d/d’ under End date. Then it would choose subscribers who signed up in the period from 21 days ago to the point you created the segment.

These time-sensitive segments are very powerful. They let you segment by what someone has bought, where they signed up, or how much they have spent. But they also let you segment by the period in which they interacted with you.

The control is very much in your hands. Use that power wisely.

Segmentation is essential in modern email marketing

Email marketing has evolved to the point where segmentation isn’t an option any more. Do you want to please your customers and help your audience? Then you need to get the right messages to them at the right time.

Blast campaigns to your whole list won’t cut the mustard any more. But with segmentation, you only send the emails you need to send. Which means less cluttered inboxes and laser precision in your marketing.

Has this whetted your appetite and you want to try a more advanced form of segmentation?

Then get in touch with us today. We’re standing by!

Originally published at Websand.