5 Tips to Use Email Segmentation to Personalize Your Customer Experience

Marketing, Restaurant & Hospitality

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Email messaging is effective.

You know this and that’s why you are taking advantage of it.

But guess what?

You are not the only one who knows this. Your competition knows it, however many they are. Your customers’ friends, family, boss and colleagues know this.

The point is that all these people each sending emails to your customer creates an avalanche of missives that can get too much. With tens or hundreds of mails a day, your customers can get overwhelmed.

As a consequence some emails will get ignored or deleted for one reason – relevance.

Get the picture?

Your customer doesn’t want to spend hours poring over emails that hold no benefits for him/her. And so if you don’t want your email to end up in the trash folder, you had better switch your game up. You do this simply by sending only relevant messages.

The question now is…

How do you send personalized messages when your customer base is comprised of individuals with different personalities and preferences?

The answer is email segmentation.

This involves the grouping of customers’ emails into different segments or classes based on certain data points. These data points include age, income level, location, buying behaviours, and many more. Email segmentation helps you ensure that you are only sending out emails that are relevant to its recipients.

Furthermore, when email segmentation is done correctly, interesting things begin to happen to your sales. According to Avari personalized emails increases your click rates by a whopping 73%. Jupiter research found that sending tailored emails can reel in 18 times more revenue. And Infosys survey showed that 86% of customers make purchasing decisions as a result of personalized email content.

To get you to create effective email segments, we have got five tips for you.

Gather The Right Information From The Start

Data is the backbone of email segmentation. Without it you have got nothing.

There are several ways to collect customer data. You can do this through in-store or online surveys, opt-in forms, POS systems, and direct request. These channels are good and many retail businesses and restaurants use them.

But they aren’t as efficient.

For instance, opt-in forms conversion rates drop by 25% for every field included. Surveys are time-consuming and you always have to give some incentive to get customers to fill them.

One of the most efficient ways to collect customer data is through social Wi-Fi.

Social Wi-Fi can be used as a bargaining chip to collect visitor data. You can collect customer information such as name and email using your Wi-Fi login page. Then you can integrate your Wi-Fi with analytics platforms like SpotOn Wi-Fi to help you collect more detailed information.

Wi-Fi analytics softwares can help you collect data such as first time purchase, frequency of visits, churn rate, favourite brands/meals, participation in loyalty programs, etc.

Find Effective Ways To Nurture Your Leads

Your new customers will come on board your email list through different channels. This presents a good opportunity for email segmentation.

You can group your new leads using their on-boarding channel as a parameter. You should create the first set of messages you send to them to align with how they found you.

For instance, if your visitors gave you their data in exchange for free Wi-Fi access, you can proffer subsequent offers using the same channel and you’d be sure it will work again. Another good idea is to make occasional references in your emails to the channel through which they came.

This shows them that you are paying close attention.

Nurturing your leads like this can increase your sales by 47%, according to the Annuitas Group.

Consider Buying Behaviour

It’s okay to segment your customer email based their demographics.

It works.

But there’s something smarter to segment by – buying behaviour. Segmenting by buying behaviour can significantly increase your customer loyalty.

This could be anything from their favourite brands of sweat pants, dessert or drink, shopping or dining day, and more. When you send emails using this kind of data, your customers will feel like you really know them and would fall in love with your brand.

Prune Your Email List

Just like you would your garden bushes, you need to prune your email list.

Here’s how…

When you look at your email response data, you will find out there are people who haven’t interacted with your email content. You can design a sort of win-back marketing campaign to get them back on track. According to a study, 45% of recipients who get win-back email letters respond to them.

By the way, here are 3 ways to get customers to buy again.

However, in the instance that they all don’t respond, just prune them out of your email list. This will keep your list healthier and more productive.

After this, you should…

Nourish Your Email List

Now that you have only healthy branches, you can encourage the healthiest branches to grow stronger.

Don’t get it?

Let me explain…

Using your email response metrics you can also find that there are subscribers who engage with your content the most. You can create a different segment using this as a parameter. Then you should create an exclusive offer for this group of subscribers.

They will appreciate the special treatment and will reward you with more purchases.

Finally…

So there you have it, 5 amazing tips to get you to create effective email segments. Doing this right will see your sales go through the roof.

However, to get this done properly you need a reliable way to collect the kind of data you need. SpotOn Wi-Fi is a robust Wi-Fi analytics and marketing software that will make the process of email segmentation easy.