Email is still a dependable, go-to marketing channel for most online businesses, especially for e-commerce ones.
The email has proven to be the one channel generating the highest ROI for marketers across B2B and B2C industries. The average open rates of email marketing campaigns across different industries are recorded around 22. 87%.
For the e-commerce domain, email can yield an ROI of up to 4400% when combined with smart customer segments or cohorts.
What is the rationale behind and how to create these customer segments for effective email ROI?
Let’s find out in this blog.
Here are 10 effective email segmentation strategies for e-commerce businesses to supercharge their revenue.
1. Email Engagement based Segmentation
Let’s keep things simple in the beginning.
Logic dictates that you can create simple customer segments based on how vividly they interact with your email campaigns.
As an e-commerce brand, your subscribers are your prospects, and sending them relevant emails is part of your sales funnel nurturing process. The catch in segmenting email lists based on your engagement metrics is to differentiate quality leads from the regular ones.
If you are sending the same generalized emails to all your subscribers, the chances are that your efforts are getting wasted.
Identifying your audiences based on engagement and then segmenting them accordingly is critical. Measure your email open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, as well as unsubscribe rates to better target the ones who are more likely to buy from you.
2. Geofencing based Segmentation
An amazingly tactical strategy to drive in more store-visitors is geofencing.
Simply put, geofencing involves creating virtual perimeters in real-world locations to create an enclosed area. Whenever a customer interacts with this boundary (entry, exit, or stay), custom SMS/Emails can be triggered to engage them.
Here is an example from Starbucks that uses geofencing to drive-in more customers into different stores. Customers receive discount notifications along with their favorite drink name – ah! The touch of personalization.
Geofencing can be incredibly powerful, especially if your e-commerce brand has an offline presence.
3. Segment based on Website Interaction
Studying how people engage on your website can help you collect a lot of useful data. Behavioral data helps in effective-personalization, and that’s the most lucrative way to market!
Sending personalized emails based on visitors’ website activity can boost up to 6x higher revenue and transaction rates. By analyzing website activities, you can get segmentation details for:
- The pages visited
- The bounce rate
- The amount of time spent on each page
- The response towards CTAs and other webpage elements they click on
- The type of products they’re interested in
You can use Wigzo’s powerful customer segmentation capabilities to create such cohorts and accelerate your conversion rate.
4. Cart Abandonment based Segmentation
Not all your customers who add products into their carts will checkout with a purchase. Shockingly, this cart abandonment phenomenon is prevalent in the e-commerce industry – and is up to 69% in some cases. That means 7 out of 10 customers will always abandon their carts at the checkout.
Here is your opportunity to create a segment and make the most out of it.
For many businesses, shopping cart abandonment emails work well. While you can’t convince every would-be customer to buy your products, it doesn’t hurt to encourage their interest with an email.
Sometimes, people stray from their virtual shopping cart due to a distraction or because they don’t have their payment information on-hand. When you send a friendly reminder that their products are still waiting for them in your online store, you can successfully recover your sales.
Or, you can leverage Wigzo’s WhatsApp Cart Recovery feature to recover up to 60% of the otherwise lost sales!
5. Birthday & Special Occasions
An excellent segmentation strategy for your customers can be to group them based on their birthdays, anniversaries, and other important life events.
Once you’ve created these ‘special life events’ based email segments, you can engage your audience with;
- Exclusive birthday discounts
- Unique gifts and vouchers with their purchase
- Offer event-specific limited deals. E.g., Free movie tickets on the birthday on a minimum purchase threshold.
Make your customers feel special and see how they reciprocate with higher purchase frequency and CLTV!
6. Demographic Segmentation
Let’s roll back to the fundamentals of segmentation. Engaging your audience based on their demographic variables can yield a much better email campaign response.
Demographic segmentation is based on the audience’s gender, age, marital status, and other attributes that could define a population. E.g., segmentations include – promoting a specific product to those with a certain annual income threshold, promoting discount offers to a given customer profile (mothers, men, students, etc.), and so on.
Wigzo allows you to create smart customer cohorts based on demographic factors. You can engage them with highly personalized email broadcasts to boost conversion numbers.
7. Behavioural Segmentation
Online data about customer behavior, past actions, likes, and dislikes can indicate their possible future actions. While behavioral analytics is a separate domain in itself, the segmentation based on it can yield more sales and conversions.
For instance, behavioral cues like product browsing, adding products to the cart, abandoning the cart, searching for discount coupons, etc., indicate specific behaviors. If the customer is nudged with a relevant message owing to his/her online behavior, they are highly likely to convert.
Your CRM analytics will allow you to group customers based on specific behaviors. You can then trigger automated personalized emails to elicit a stellar conversion rate.
8. Location-based Segmentation
This is the simplest customer cohort you can create for email campaigns. Grouping customers based on their local, national, or even international region can help you send more personalized emails to nurture them down the sales funnel.
For instance, you might be an e-commerce brand that sells camping gear. Your customers might come from different parts of the country. However, those coming from snowy mountainous regions will have similar needs. So, you can group them based on the region, say Alaska, and target ‘snow boots promotion’ to push more sales.
9. Recency, Frequency & Monetary based Segmentation
The RFM market cluster is created based on the most recent purchase (Recency), the number of purchases made (Frequency), and the total amount spent by the customer (Monetary).
This segmentation sets and exploits different brand loyalty benchmarks. You can create customer segments based on how recently they made a purchase, how many purchases they made, and the average order value. Then target them with personalized emails for superior engagement and response.
10. Inactive Subscribers Segmentation
Let’s talk about those subscribers in the list that have fallen into the vat of inactivity and haven’t engaged with your brand in a long while.
You can create segments based on subscribers’ inactivity – say 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year. Then, design specific campaigns to re-engage them under your ‘Win Back’ strategy. And let go of those who choose not to interact with your brand.
Got your mind storming?
You now have proven email segmentation strategies at your disposal. Power them up and experience unparalleled growth for your e-commerce brand.
