The essentials of segmentation in Email strategy for eCommerce

Keeping customers engaged and loyal is the goal of any successful eCommerce business. It can be one of the most effective ways to do that  and represents up to 30% to 40% of revenues for best-performing eCommerce. Using an email strategy, eCommerce businesses can increase website traffic, generate leads, and boost sales. 

In this article, we'll cover some foundations of email marketing in eCommerce and share with you a few of our practices and insights at Joyjet. 

Your Emailing strategy has to support your Customer Lifetime value

90% of ecommerce are sending emails to their entire list expecting the most conversion from an email campaign. They are missing the point!

They need to change their perspective from a campaign level to a Customer level.

The ultimate goal of an email strategy is to help to increase your Customer Lifetime Value, meaning making more purchases and with greater frequency for as long as possible. Emails support this goal very efficiently as a tool capable of sending the right messages/offers to the right people at the right times.

Good segmentation is everything for ecommerce

The first step to creating an email strategy that supports your CLV  is to segment your email list. The difference between an email list and a segment is that segments are dynamic while an email list is static. Segments rely on the business activities of their members and/or their attributes.

For example, one of your segments can represent people who bought more than 3 products in the last 12 months but did not purchase from you during the last 3 months. So, you can decide to send them a discount code to make them turn back to your ecommerce.

This means that you need to understand your client’s needs and preferences as well as their buying behavior when it comes to eCommerce purchases, and so, to identify business opportunities

So, once you have identified your segments, you can then create an engagement plan that will help you reach out to them on a regular basis with relevant content and offers with which they will be interested in engaging.

Here are some relevant segments according to your business

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5 Best practices to optimize the segmentation of your email campaigns

Start simple

Don't overload yourself from the get-go! If you jump into segmentation strategy with both feet, it could leave a bit of an overwhelming mess. Start simple and give yourself wiggle room for learning - that way your message won’t be muddled up in chaos!

Remain agile and flexible

Keep your email segmentation plan agile to make sure you don't miss out on any opportunities. To do this, set benchmarks for engagement and then track them closely each week - if they look like they need a tweak here or there, go ahead! As far as which segments to focus on, it's not rocket science: remember the criteria that will always stay constant such as race and gender. Boom! You've got yourself an awesome strategy in no time.

Warmup your email list

Sending emails to new email lists is a lot like an awkward high school dance: warm up with smaller moves before you break out the big stuff! Start small and take it slow, otherwise your message may find itself on the spam floor instead of in someone's inbox.

Automate as much as possible

Don't waste all your time and energy on creating a segmentation strategy - automate it! It may take some budgeting if you're working with complex email segments, but for small business owners, basic data collection tools will do the trick just as well. So get ready to save yourself from excessive manual labor by delegating where appropriate: automation is key to success here!

Design and build for human connection

Looking to grab your customers' attention and build an emotional connection?
Look no further than a creative, compelling story! When it comes to engaging with businesses, empathy is key: you have the opportunity to make them feel like their suffering isn't in vain. Captivate potential subscribers by showing that you understand (and more importantly) know how they can escape whatever pain has been inflicted upon them - all through effective storytelling. If this doesn't get people coming back for more ROI-building content every time then we don't know what will!

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