Even though many new marketing channels are popping up every day, email marketing still remains king. The only caveat with email marketing is that your subscribers are being bombarded by many emails apart from yours. In fact, research shows that the average worker receives 121 emails a day. As for the number of emails sent daily, here’s a shocking statistic from Statista: Source: Statista A whopping 281 billion emails were sent and received per day in 2018, and the number is only bound to increase. The battle to get noticed in the inbox is fierce. As a marketer, you need to follow email marketing best practices in order to grab your customer’s attention. Not only do you need their attention, but also their interaction with your emails. One email marketing best practice to follow is list segmentation.
What is Email Segmentation?
Email list segmentation is an email marketing technique whereby you “slice and dice” your email list in order to group particular subscribers into different segments based on a number of predefined conditions. Ultimately, list segmentation helps you: Address subscribers on a personal level Create relevant content The criteria you use to segment your list will largely depend on the goals you have for your email campaign. However, they can be anything from:
- Location
- Gender
- Purchase history
- Age
What you really need is the best denominator you can use to group similar subscribers into one segment. However, you also need to know how to remove contacts from a segment. Let’s tackle this issue step by step.
Are there Any Real Benefits to Segmentation?
Email list segmentation forms the basis of any successful email campaigns. Here are 5 benefits of email list segmentation that make it so powerful.
Get Personal with Your Customers
The greatest benefit email list segmentation offers is the ability to personalize emails. The reality of every business is that you deal with different customers with different needs and treating them all the same way won’t work. By segmenting your email list, you can treat each customer, not only as an individual, but as a VIP. Source: Really Good Emails This kind of treatment endears them to you and transforms them into a lifelong customer. As you well know, repeat customers are the backbone of every business.
Cater to Customers at Different Levels of Your Sales Funnel
A thriving business has different customers who are passing through various stages of the sales funnel. List segmentation helps you send timely, targeted, and relevant messages to each of those customers. For example, a customer at the top of the funnel (awareness stage) needs a totally different message from one that’s at the bottom of the funnel (purchase stage). Segmenting your email list will allow you to easily solve this challenge and give your customers an enjoyable experience as they go down your funnel.
Increases Engagement
Because of the way email list segmentation allows you to create relevant and timely content for your subscribers, it results in them engaging more with your emails. Engagement is what leads to conversions. In a study conducted by Campaign Monitor, marketers noted a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns.
Improves Your Sender Reputation
Your sender reputation has to do with how trustworthy you are to ISPs. The more your audience engages with your emails, it signals to the ISPs that you are trustworthy and deserve to reach your recipient’s inbox. At the same time, the opposite is also true. The less your audience interacts with your emails, the more likely you are to end up in the spam folder.
3 Good Reasons to Remove Subscribers from a Segment
With all the amazing things we’ve looked at concerning email list segmentation, could there be any possible reason to remove subscribers from a segment? Follow along for 3 good reasons to remove contacts from a list.
1. Some Emails May Be Bouncing
According to Hubspot, email lists depreciate by about 22.5% every year. This leads to some emails bouncing due to:
- People shifting jobs (thereby closing down their email accounts)
- Domains closing down
- Some emails being blocked
Whatever the reason for your emails bouncing, there’s no reason to keep them in your list as continually emailing them can lead to your sender reputation being compromised.
2. Your Subscriber May Have Lost Interest
Let’s face it, some relationships aren’t meant to last forever. That’s especially true in business. Some subscribers may lose interest in your content resulting in them not opening your emails. While it’s tempting to hope they will eventually start opening them one day, the harm to your business is almost immediate. For one, if your email marketing platform charges you by the number of emails sent or subscribers on your list, meaning sending emails to dormant subscribers becomes costly.
3. You No Longer Have a Use for the Segment
Yes, it’s possible. There are times when certain segments just don’t make business sense anymore. The solution? Delete the segment. Before you start panicking about losing all those precious contacts, you have to know that deleting a segment does not result in those contacts being completely removed from your list. You will still have their contacts in your database and their data will remain the same. Email list management is an important part of your email marketing, and knowing how to remove contacts from your segments is an important aspect of list management.
How to Remove Contacts from a Segment
Now that you know the importance of email list segmentation, and the need to keep your segments clean, let’s get to the main focal point of the day – how to remove contacts from an email list segment. There are a couple of ways to remove contacts from an email segment.
1. Removing Inactive Subscribers
Removing inactive subscribers from your list is a bit of a process, albeit a worthwhile one. This is because you have to run a re-engagement campaign first. This campaign may succeed and re-engage some of your subscribers. As for those who do not re-engage, you can then safely remove them from your segment. If you are a Delivra client, this process is simple. All you have to do is change their status to held or expired. This will prevent any more emails being sent out to them from that particular segment. What about subscribers that request to be unsubscribed? Source: Delivra Delivra automatically removes these by taking them to the suppression list.
2. Removing Redundant Contacts
Need to know how to remove contacts that are giving you hard bounces? Since these ones can never be contacted again, you will need a permanent solution for them, unlike the inactive subscribers above. In order to permanently stop sending emails to these contacts, you can add them to a suppression list. Simply put, a suppression list is a list of emails you don’t want to send emails to.
3. Removing an Entire List
As said, there are times when you need to remove an entire list from your email marketing software. If you’re a Delivra client, all you have to do is contact support, give them the name of your list, and the segment you want to remove. The rest will be taken care of for you.
Wrap Up
Email list segmentation is a powerful marketing strategy that produces phenomenal results. However, in order for you to enjoy the fruit of segmentation, you will have to maintain healthy segments. That process involves knowing how to remove contacts from your segment and when to do it. Just to recap, here’s when to remove contacts from your segment:
- When email addresses are no longer in use
- Subscribers are no longer interested in your content
- The segment is no longer relevant to your business goals
There you have it. Now you know how to remove contacts from a segment. However, since keeping contacts is even more important, here’s how to measure your subscribers
engagements. Go ahead and check it out.
