As any seasoned email marketer knows, there are almost an unlimited amount of ways to segment email marketing subscriber data. In this three-part overview, Jordan Lane provides a summary of some common email segmentation sources, tips, and best practices.

Part I – Behavioral segmentation

Behavioral segmentation relies exclusively on subscriber actions, and does not take into account gender, location, age, or other demographic factors. Behavioral segmentation data is based 100% on email activity and can be customized based on a marketer’s needs and how they define certain types of customers. Because this type of segmentation is usually easy to start and update, behavioral slicing represents an easy win for most email marketers.

Here are some common behavioral categorizations that email marketers use to chop up their master subscriber list:

1. New subscribers
   These are newest additions to your list within a certain time period. They should all receive a welcome message explaining or demonstrating the value of your email program.
2. Inactives
   Inactive subscribers are those who have not opened or clicked on an email since a given date. You may consider re-engaging these subscribers with a re-activation campaign, or after a certain cut–off point, remove them from the master file and put them in a secondary list to save money on full-file mailings.
3. Actives
   These represent the subscribers who have opened and clicked on your emails during a recent time period, but have not converted. You might want to test various offers to different subsets of this population and see which is the winning message.
4. Buyers
   Those subscribers who have recently converted are considered buyers. Marketers should consider a recent purchase lifecycle program to encourage repeat purchases. In traditional database marketing 101, your most recent purchasers are your most important ones.
5. Browsers
   People who have opened email but not clicked or converted are considered browsers. You may consider re-engaging these subscribers with a re-activation campaign or special offer to get them engaged with your emails again. You also should keep tabs on how these customers are performing across other channels – they may be using your emails as an informational tool to assist in their in-store purchases, etc.

Other behavioral segmentation schemes include purchase trends (time of year, month, day of the week etc.), number of items purchased, purchase price, anniversary date, browse behavior (i.e. web analytics data), gift lists, email domain, and special programs.

Any way you choose to slice your data, you can be sure that more precise targeting will yield more profitable and engaged customers.

Tags: Actives, Browsers, Buyers, demographic, email behavior, email marketing, email segmentation, Inactives, New subscribers, segmentation

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