What is one way e-commerce companies should segment their customer list for email marketing? 

To help your company segment their customer lists for email marketing, we asked marketing experts and business leaders this question for their best advice. From reaching out to customers with abandoned carts to analyzing customer spending patterns, there are several pieces of advice that may help you with your email marketing.

Here are nine ways e-commerce companies should segment their customer list for email marketing: 

• Track Your Promoters
• Complement Their Past Purchases
• Reach Out With Their Abandoned Carts
• Target Your Engaged Audience
• Analyze Customer Spending Patterns
• Segment By Platform
• Organize By Location
• Target Last Website Visit
• Streamline Follow-Up Campaigns

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Track Your Promoters 

Promoters. Some customers are so happy with their purchase that they will promote your brand through beneficial actions like leaving a review on an e-commerce site or sharing their purchase on a social media profile. Tracking which customers are your “promoters” can be a beneficial way to segment and reward customers on an email list.

Daniel Richmond, Tic Watches

Complement Their Past Purchases

The best way to segment an email marketing campaign for an e-commerce company is by looking at the buyer’s past purchases. The easiest way to do this is to start sending out email recommendations for similar items that you sell that would go well with the buyer’s previous purchases. This will ensure that you are capturing the right target market! 

Kayla Centeno, Markitors

Reach Out With Their Abandoned Carts

We have a shopping section on our website for the products we sell. There are many ways to segment customer lists from e-commerce for email marketing. For instance, creating lists of those who abandoned carts can be useful to eventually follow up with those customers. They were obviously interested in our products in the first place, so there is still a chance to gain their interest and eventually gain more conversions.

Matt Seaburn, Rent A Wheel

Target Your Engaged Audience

It’s important to segment engaged versus unengaged audiences. Many e-commerce brands send out their email campaigns to their whole newsletter list. We recommend sending out all campaigns to just your engaged list—this helps with spam, open rates, etc. It’s also important to have a strategy to warm up unengaged users or remove them after a win-back series!

Hannah Byrd, Absolute Web

Analyze Customer Spending Patterns

As with all things in marketing, there is no right or wrong way to segment your customer list for email marketing as every business is different. The one thing that holds true across all businesses, however, is the need to thoroughly understand your customers and their spending patterns, i.e., how often they shop at your store, what their average basket ring is, what products are commonly purchased together, etc. With a solid understanding of these metrics, you can create powerful segments that target your best customers, repeat buyers, and even the ones that don’t convert with highly targeted promotions. My one rule of thumb is that the customer metrics being used to develop these segments must come from first-party sales data, as no one knows your customers better than you!

Amy Zwagerman, The Launch Box

Segment By Platform 

One quick and easy way that e-commerce companies can segment their lists is by how they arrived at your website. So if it’s through social media, drill down more and find out which platform, like Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook. Analyzing the different platforms and other ways customers found you, such as organic search or ads, will help you create a more customized customer journey for the people coming to your website.

Gresham Harkless Jr., Blue 16 Media

Organize By Location 

Location is an important way that ecommerce businesses should segment their customer lists. Segmenting by location has been shown to increase open and click-through rates. This is because location-specific targeting creates value for the customer. You are sending them something that is of interest to them and is relevant to where they are.

Joe Flanagan, VelvetJobs

Target Last Website Visit 

Segmenting by “last website visit” is big for us. We know that if a user has visited our site within 30 days, they are likely to be more receptive to marketing emails, and we can send them more. Conversely, if a user bought something last year and we never saw them again, we don’t want to be emailing them weekly until they show back up on our site. In short, we let them determine how close they are to buying again and, therefore, how many emails they should be getting.

Quincy Smith, TEFL Hero

Streamline Follow-Up Campaigns

People dislike getting spammed with similar emails. If you plan to send a follow-up to a marketing email, most email marketing tools offer the option to segment and target users who did not open the first email. Doing so helps create values for users who inadvertently missed the first message while avoiding sending the same email to users who already opened and engaged with the first email. Failing to omit engaged users can lead to poor user frustration and a high unsubscribe rate.

Hung Nguyen, Smallpdf

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