Email is an important channel of communication with your customers. Unlike other marketing tools, the length of email copies enables to add to them much information, images, UGC, video, animation, dynamic elements, making email campaigns rather engaging and entertaining.
But catchy design isn’t the only advantage of email. Workflows, campaign schedule, frequency strategies and contact base advanced segmentation have big technologies behind them as well.
Nowadays competition for a customer is as intense as never before, so marketers no longer send only bulk messages regardless of whoever receives them. Email marketing strategies have become an important term of marketing vocabulary, and each campaign is well-thought considering numerous factors.
Below, we’ll take a look at one of them – segmentation by events – and see how it can improve customer engagement and benefit your marketing results.
What Is Segmentation?
Segmentation is an approach that allows to split your contact base into small groups (segments) based on different parameters, according to TechTarget. Any piece of customer data can be a parameter used for segmentation – from location to average check. Therefore, the more data you have, the more conditions you have for segmentation.
The biggest advantage of customer segmentation is that it enables to send relevant content to the right people when they’re most likely to respond, says Intercom. Let’s imagine you’re an eсommerce selling a wide range of beauty products, from body scrub to lip gloss. Your audience isn’t homogeneous and consists of various groups: males, females, teenagers, 40+, seniors, office workers, athletes, mothers, singles, medically conditioned, etc. As a marketer, you understand that one campaign won’t fit all, and it’s better to apply personalized approaches.
This is where segmentation steps in. You can segment the audience by age and send corresponding offers to each segment: teenage products for a younger audience and care products for the older. You can sort out contacts with children and offer them complementary baby products. You can segment repeat customers with regular purchases and offer them to join your loyalty program, or send a special campaign with limited stock to the VIP segment. The number of segments and microsegments depends only on the customer data you’ve managed to collect.
Thus, by addressing people with offers that are currently the most relevant for them, your campaigns get more chances to generate response and bring you profit.
Segmentation by Events: How It Works
Segmentation by events is a subcategory of general segmentation. An event is any website activity or inactivity by a contact that you can track and collect: visits, page views, product added to the cart, abandoned cart, purchased items, etc.
There are two ways you can track customer behavior:
- Web tracking. You choose a marketing platform that supports web tracking > install a tracking script on your website > data is automatically collected and transferred to the platform.
- API. You use API methods to send any event to the marketing platform > an event can contain unlimited parameters with detailed information.
Take a look at the event sent via API. This is an order with the following parameters: price, item name, location of the order, customer’s email address.
Put in words, this order consisted of pizza, was made in New York, and cost $1,500. The contact has an email address, meaning it’s available for email campaigns. And this is the example of the segment you can build based on this data:
Next, it’s up to you to decide what campaigns to send this contact and others who meet these conditions. Since $1,500 for pizza is big money, you can invite contacts who spend more than $1,200 ($1,000, $1,450, etc.) to a special pizza club or offer them a VIP card or loyalty card. If you run any sales on delivery around New York, or there is a new pizza menu in your New York restaurants, these people should be among first to know it.
How to Use Segmentation by Events in Your Marketing Strategies
And here are some more ideas to use events for precise segment building. Imagine, you’re a big fitness center with a wide range of memberships: monthly cards, yearly cards, pay as you go classes, group workouts, indoor, outdoor, personal coaching, classes for kids, circuits for seniors, etc. Your audience is as diverse as your agenda, so they all need personalized approaches to link them even closer to your brand.
So, you can use segmentation by membership card purchase (parameters – price, card type, card expiration date, quantity, location) and use it as follows:
- Send reminders before the card expiration date and offer the best options to continue membership.
- Depending on the card type, upsell additional services. For example, the cardholder that buys only classes for the pregnant may be interested in prenatal massage or partner yoga. The cardholder that buys only morning classes is more likely to respond to offers promoting relevant activities like sunrise on SUPs, jigging club for early birds, etc.
- Customers who buy more than one card most probably visit your place with a partner or other family members. Offer them to invite let’s say, two more members and get a group discount for all facilities. Group marathons, challenges, kids club, parental classes will also be a good fit for this category.
- Clients from Austin deserve to know first about new offices, staff, classes or sales at your Austin places. Clients from Chicago are obviously more interested about activities going on in Chicago.
- Offer people who subscribe to expensive memberships to join your loyalty program and collect bonuses to exchange them for prizes or exclusive offers (for example be the first to try your new training).
- Offer people who pay per class to save money by buying packages (for example, buy 10 classes and get 1 free visit).
The list can go on and on and only depends on your offers and marketing imagination. These examples are applicable to any other industry as well: you can send any events with any parameters based on your business.
As you see, segmentation by events is a win-win tool: you send personalized offers that generate response and your subscribers receive content they’re most interested in at the moment. You get a bigger revenue, people save their time on browsing through irrelevant emails. Plus, you’ll have extensive data for analysis and can monitor what exact campaigns get more clicks.