No longer is it enough to simply segment your target audience by age, region, and gender and expect email marketing to perform above average. Email marketers need to utilize behavioral data to create segments that are more dynamic and responsive. Behavioral segmentation allows the email marketing professional to craft a message that is on point with needs, resulting in increased personalization, precision, and engagement. This article explores how you can effectively create better segments for email based on behavior for more successful campaigns.

Why Demographics is Not Enough for Segmentation

Demographic segmentation has always been one of the cornerstones for targeting certain audiences/recipient groups because it constitutes basic individual and personal traits. However, relying merely on this factor can become slightly too generic and, at times, ineffective. For example, people of the same gender, age, marital status, occupation, etc., still have varying interests. Some content can seem irrelevant to certain subgroups of recipients merely because they fall under the same demographic inclusivity umbrella. This can lead to lower engagement rates, and in some cases, even trigger deliverability issues such as SMTP error 554.571, which often indicates spam-like or mismatched content for the intended recipient ultimately compounding missed efforts in creating a more fruitful relationship with subscribers.

Why Using Behavioral Data to Segment Your Emails is More Effective

Behavioral segmentation gives the marketer the ability to see what the user does and creates a specific, targeted audience based on email opens, clicks received, browsing history on a website, what they’ve purchased in the past, and any other action that dictates specific interest. Compared to demographics, behavioral data provides further insight as to what people like and want to see. Thus, marketers can personalize the email that much more. Without adding any additional effort beyond personal assessments, marketers can automatically boost email relevance to their consumers to guarantee higher open rates and click-throughs as they start on a better foot from the first sight. Higher engagement rates equal higher campaign performance and ROI.

What Behavioral Data to Collect for Effective Segmentation

The quickest way to assess and create more effective behavioral segments is to collect the right behavioral data in the first place. Some of the most valuable information includes how subscribers interact with email (opens, clicks, shares), when they do and how often, whether they browse on website pages for particular products, whether they abandon carts and how often, what they’ve purchased previously and when, and even how they’ve responded to customer service (positively or negatively). Gathering this type of behavioral data and analyzing it gives marketers a clearer picture of what subscribers favor and when, better equipping them to deliver more relevant and timely messaging.

How to Segment Based on Email Behavior

One of the simplest yet most effective ways to create segments is through email engagement behaviors. If you know who opens your emails and frequently clicks through (or doesn’t), you can create separate groups based on engagement alone. This means the highly engaged subscribers may appreciate more frequent outreach to offer them deals and exclusive content. Those who rarely open with low engagement may be better suited to receive win-back campaigns. Regardless, segmentation based on engagement behavior not only boosts the general engagement of your various audiences but also leads to a clean subscriber list over time.

Segmentation Based on Browsing and Purchase History

In addition, tracking subscriber browsing and purchase history on your site offers a treasure trove of segmentation opportunities. If people are browsing certain categories or leaving items in their carts you can create a segment and send a follow-up email accordingly. This is effective segmentation for marketers to recapture interest and convert with ease with super relevant communication based on what they’ve already done.

Segmentation Based on Lifecycle Stage

Finally, an advanced way to segment your email marketing list is to segment based on lifecycle stage through behavior. People in different lifecycle stages from highly active subscribers to one-time purchasers to users who haven’t opened an email in months act differently and engage differently. Segmentation based on where someone is in their lifecycle cuts through the clutter and allows marketers to send super relevant information at just the right time to help users progress through the funnel from awareness to action to loyalty and even advocacy.

Email Marketing Results Boosted through Personalization and Automation from Behavioral Segmentation

Segmentation by behavior allows for increased personalization and automation strategies that can drive email marketing results through the roof. For example, sending automated triggered emails based on certain actions welcome emails, purchase confirmations, and abandoned cart follow-ups helps to ensure the message is time and place appropriate. When email marketers rely on behavioral segmentation to automate campaigns, they spend less time manually plugging away and more time giving people the personalized messages they would appreciate, which leads to higher open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates than what is seen with scattershot blasts.

Combining with Demographic Segmentation Provides Even Better Results for Increased Precision

While behavioral segmentation is a bit more advanced than demographics to better understand subscribers, the ultimate in results comes when combining the two. For example, knowing where someone lives or how old they are, combined with what they’ve purchased before, gives email marketers an even better roster of audience-segmented details from which to derive their work. Further personalization of campaign content by virtue of knowing multiple data points about subscribers allows for better targeting, resulting in more successful engagement rates, conversion rates, and long-term customer relationships.

Data Drives Ongoing Segmentation Refinement Efforts Over Time

Segmentation by behavior requires ongoing efforts over time. Campaigns can be assessed according to successes and failures, highlighting whether certain segments fared well or not, which offers insight into what new trends have been discovered due to behavioral changes or shifts in subscriber interests. The more email marketers can segment over time, the more relevant their messaging will be, creating sustainable success for email marketing campaigns.

Fixing the Flaws of Behavioral Segmentation

Because behavioral segmentation depends upon user data, an understanding of privacy and compliance is required. Marketers must relate how data will be tracked, they must attempt to get consent to acquire it, and they must comply with privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. Should this fail, companies could render subscribers angry and lose them with legal facets that can wipe out a segment in one night. Therefore, the proper management of positioning strategies that work, legally, comes from more successes than failures and creates a trustworthy rapport down the road that allows customers to easily give more information about themselves. As long as people know their information is safe, most are flattered that marketers take an interest in them and find them special enough to want to know more.

Behavioral Segmentation Requires Marketing Team Training

Another facet to ensure greatness in the implementation of behavioral segmentation is that the marketing team should be trained on best practices for understanding the segmentation itself and how to read/apply findings. When the whole team understands how insight-fueled data segmentation can benefit themselves, when they should segment their own efforts, and what new automation tools are available, the focused and personalized email efforts can be implemented much easier as the backend will be just as strategic as the frontend is trying to be. When team members learn from continuous training from elsewhere, they will learn proactive guidance for segmentation strategies that may not have ever been considered prior and in the end, the overall success of email marketing will be better through smarter behavioral-based decisions.

Ongoing Assessment of Behavioral Segmentation Provides Value

Assessing whether or not behavioral segmentation grew was a success is something that should be done often and ongoing. Without assessing very often if one segmentation avenue is doing better or worse than anticipated, how would one know? By reviewing open rates, click rates, and conversions consistently inclusive of revenue per email marketers can easily translate the efficacy of behavioral segmentation in its end goal via consistent performance. To validate it’s not valuable is a good thing to know; to show efficacy brings marketers the understanding of stats that justify greater investment in acquisition, evaluation, and future segmentation adjustments.

Behavioral Segmentation with CRM

When you take advantage of behavioral segmentation in conjunction with your CRM, it becomes even easier to predict what subscribers want. For example, by compiling a subscriber’s segmentation based on behavior based on email performance, website visits, and purchases you give your marketing and sales teams invaluable insight that’s located in one place. The more your teams have access to detailed information about subscriber behavior, the better they can customize outreach across all platforms and provide superior customer service, meaning campaigns will become more effective.

Predictive Behavioral Segmentation

When you include predictive analytics as part of your behavioral segmentation strategy, you can better assess what a subscriber is going to do. Clearly, if someone opened the same email 10 times, it could mean they’re interested; however, it could also mean they’re not seeing other emails, so they keep going back to the same one, thinking it might give them what they want. Predictive behavioral segmentation looks at what actions would typically occur after trending behavior, such as the above, so that you can proactively send an amazing offer, upsell and cross-sell, or help prevent someone from churning. With predictive analytics, you’ll get ahead of the subscriber concerns and tendencies.

A/B Testing Behavioral Segmentation

The best way to ensure your behavioral segmentation is performing how you planned and to ultimately improve it is through consistent A/B testing. You can create one segment based on certain actions and another segment based on an entirely different set of data and see which group responds better to an email campaign. You can test subject lines or the times at which a behavioral segment gets the proposed email campaign to see what performs best. The more you test thanks to behavior-based offerings, the better understanding you’ll have of what’s successful for your segments and how you can enhance them over time. A/B testing offers consistency and evolution of email marketing.

Conclusion

The ideal way to create successful email segments is with behavioral data, not demographic data, as it increases relevancy, engagement, and conversion. Demographic segments are a surface-level opportunity. While you can surmise that men will like this product more than that one, the demographic segment fails to account for nuanced interests, purchase intent, or needs. Yet, the behavioral segment allows you to rely on the actions taken by your subscribers, what they opened, what they clicked, their purchases, the amount of time spent on a certain page, etc. This indicates interest and needs and allows you to better target and fulfill.

When you can utilize the insight from these behavioral actions to your benefit, you start to learn what subscribers are interested in and how they like to interact. For example, subscribers who click on the teaser of your promotional emails may enjoy having coupons sent to them, while those who read your blog posts may appreciate detailed guides or tips sent based on their interests. Through automation and triggered messages, you could even reach out when your subscribers take specific actions; if someone continuously looks at a particular category, never purchasing, maybe a coupon sent to them will sway them to finally convert.

In addition, segments can be adjusted regularly based upon behavioral insights which help brands assess what’s changing within subscriber interest. Stale segments result in stale messaging. But when you update and re-segment on a regular basis, even if it’s not always welcomed, you have new messaging that’s trying to be relevant. Behavioral segmentation allows for amazing personalization, which increases subscriber satisfaction. Brands that consistently appeal to interests find subscribers finding value in what they receive, and thus favorable feelings toward the brand foster stronger relationships.

Thus, campaigns perform better on a consistent basis with open rates, CTRs, and conversions for quick wins skyrocketing. Subscriber satisfaction increases engagement, retention, and brand loyalty all of which impact the longer-term goals. As subscriber satisfaction increases, so does the retention rate, customer lifetime value; the more relevant messaging sent, the more recipients appreciate them and become brand advocates. Therefore, behavioral segmentation provides not only effective champions for each campaign but greater ROI opportunities down the line. Greater insights and analytics to know the audience only help with better efforts down the line.

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