5 segments for your newsletters
We are sometimes met with the view that you may as well send every email to the whole list, to reach as many people as possible. The consequence is that each individual recipient gets a lot of content with nothing in it for them.
Over time they stop opening and engaging, or they unsubscribe outright. And when your email performs badly in general, the mail clients start putting more of it in the spam folder, because your sender reputation has slipped. So it costs you with the people who did want to read everything you send.
Here are five kinds of segment you can put to work straight away, to target what you send and tidy up your setup.
New recipients
If you have a welcome flow or a lead nurture flow whose job is to warm new recipients up, it is disruptive if they receive your weekly newsletter at the same time.
So build a segment of new recipients and exclude them from your individual campaigns while the welcome sequence runs.
How you set it up depends on how long that sequence is. If it runs for 20 days, you might define the segment as everyone who signed up less than 21 days ago.
People who attended an event, webinar or course
Having signed up for a particular event tells you something about a recipient’s interests — and that is useful the next time you send a campaign or newsletter on the same subject.
You can also use the segment when you run a similar event later, or simply to say thank you after the one just finished. If you sell through your newsletters, an offer on the back of the event is the obvious move.
Active and inactive recipients
It is worth thanking your active recipients, so they stay active. If you sell products, that might be a discount or free delivery. If email is not a sales channel for you, you can still offer something free as thanks — knowledge, a guide, something they would otherwise pay attention to find.
A segment for active recipients might combine “click rate above 75%” with “last clicked within 10 days” and “created more than 3 months ago”. The last condition keeps out people who just signed up and have opened one or two messages.
At the same time, try to reactivate the inactive ones — and if that fails, remove them. Inactive recipients damage your sender reputation. When Outlook and Gmail decide whether your mail belongs in the inbox or in spam, one of the things they weigh is how many recipients actually see and engage with it.
So the more inactive recipients you carry, the more likely your future mail ends up filtered. There is more on this in our 5 tips to stay out of the spam folder.
A sunset flow
- Send to recipients who have not clicked in a given period — we suggest three months.
- Getting them to open requires a different kind of subject line, which is easier said than done. Look at your usual ones and deliberately go another way; otherwise this message goes unopened like the rest. Our subject line tips may help.
- Speak to the value of your newsletter. Reminding them of it raises the chance they stay. Make clear that they need to click to carry on receiving it, with a specific call to action and a landing page built for the purpose.
- Send a second email a few days later if they did not click the first. Use the subject line to say they will be removed if they do not click within three days.
- Remove the recipients who clicked neither.
Interest segments
To make your newsletters more targeted, look at your communication — or your products — and work out how it divides into subjects that match different recipients’ interests.
There are several ways to do it. The first and easiest is to let people choose their interests when they sign up. Three to five options is about right; with too many, the visitor loses patience.
You can also build interest segments from how recipients behave in your newsletters. In Ubivox you can use on-click actions for that: when a recipient clicks a link with the function enabled, a data field on their record is updated automatically.
For example: you send a newsletter linking to wines from different regions. When a recipient clicks into a particular region, an interest field is updated with it. In future you can target wines from that region at exactly that segment.
Alongside this, we recommend letting people opt out of particular kinds of communication, especially if you increase your frequency or change your approach. They still get the important messages without feeling spammed. If you run several lists for the same recipients, your unsubscribe form can let them leave a single list rather than everything at once.
Segments on the data you already hold
Beyond the above, it is worth looking at the standing data and demographics you already have, where it is relevant to what you send.
Do you have messages that only matter to people in certain areas? Or in certain age groups?
The same data lets you target further when recipients have chosen preferences at sign-up.
Some of our customers communicate across very different subjects. For them it makes more sense to split the newsletter into several, so recipients can subscribe to the ones they want and leave the rest. You can see how that works in practice on our integrations page, where sign-ups flow between a customer’s own website and Ubivox.
Need help setting your segments up?
Write to support, or ask us for a meeting where we go through your setup together.