Email marketing plays an important role nowadays and it is going to stay with us “for a while” which means it’s not dying at all (like some people may say). However not every marketers use the best email marketing practices. You probably heard about email list segmentation.

What does it actually mean? Well, let’s find an appropriate example: you buy your grocery at a store where you usually choose organic food and healthy snacks. Do you want to get a newsletter offering you junk food and sugary sweets.

I’m pretty sure you don’t. Because you want to get a personalized email sharing the best special offers for organic food or healthy cooking tips and recipes. Your recipients want the same, they would like to get the right email that is based on their preferences.

Once you start to segment your list you’ll discover soon that your subscribers’ open, click-through and conversion rate will significantly rise. We know that by now that this is the point.

Let’s see know what are the 5 best practices for segmenting your email list.

1. Subscribers’ engagement: this is actually the basic step for segmenting your subscribers. First you have to check your active and inactive subscribers. Just an example of this: a subscriber who hasn’t clicked on or opened your emails in 8 months or even longer obviously isn’t active any more. But you always have to be sure whether they are interested in your service or product so you can launch a re-engagement campaign for the inactive subscribers. It does no good to your email deliverability when you send out emails to inactive subscribers. You can also find out who the most active which means the best subscribers are. In this way to keep them entertained and you also nurture them. It’s very important.
2. Creating personas for subscribers:
   It’s also very useful to know and understand your audience. You have to keep in mind the following things: the most profitable values of your subscribers (buyers) and to know their personality traits; why they choose your service or product over the competitor’s brand.  Segmenting by persona and creating segments for each type of persona also can help to rise open, click-through and conversion rates.
3. Website behaviour analysis:
   Do you know what products and(or) services your customers viewed at your site? If you don’t then you should focus on web analytic packages that will help you to find out. First you need to get a better insight into your subscribers’ “taste” and what they are interested in purchasing from you. Once you know this then you can create segments and tailor your email contents to each segment.
4. Your customers’ shopping habit: when you have clients-subscribers who only make purchase from your website you can always send them specific online offers ie. free shipping. There are also businesses with real stores who can segment their customers by different locations and try to make special offers for each and every location.
5. Cart-abandonment recovery: There are subscribers who for some reason abandon the shopping cart or the sign-up form then you should create a segment for this group too. You can always email them and give them a little push to buy your product or service.

But we all know that result talks. Here are the top 3 results of the email list segmentation:

• Increased open rates
• Greater Email Relevance
• Lower Opt-Out-Unsubscribe Rates

and the rest: