The Power of Automation in Email Segmentation
If you’re looking for ways to use AI or automation tools to speed up your marketing processes and increase effectiveness—email marketing segmentation is an approachable way to make the most of rapidly advancing digital capabilities.
Most of us are inundated with a variety of marketing emails on a daily basis. Most email services do a decent job filtering out true junk email… scams and large low-effort, unsolicited bulk emails. Some email services also filter for promotional emails with varying levels of success.
Yet with the high level of brand engagement in current daily life, many people still get anywhere from a couple to a couple dozen marketing emails daily. So how—in an oversaturated channel—does an organization make their marketing emails stand out?
Segmenting your content for truly personalized and relevant content is one of the best ways to increase open rates, engagement, and conversion rates. Email segmentation can seem time consuming and costly, but this is one key area where automation tools are worth their weight in gold. (That metaphor doesn’t work very well, does it? The tools don’t weigh very much. Well, let’s just say they’re very valuable!)
Data Collection for Segmentation
Although we’ll take a look at newer automation capabilities, one of the most valuable ways email automation tools help is through the basic act of collecting relevant data, helping you clean your data, and creating segments based on that data. This is no small task, and the more data we can collect and manage, the more advanced and effective we can get with segmentation. Almost all email automation tools have powerful ways to help us handle segmentation data, and knowing how to make the most of these features is crucial.
Dynamic Segments Updated Automatically
Closely related to just overall data collection, dynamic segmentation (now another common email automation capability) means that our tools continuously update customer segments as new data comes in… giving us real-time updates. This means our email campaigns get sent with the most recent information available. No more static or delayed segmentation.
Predictive Analytics
If you have enough customer or audience data, then predictive analytics is a proactive approach to segmentation that can boost ROI. A lot of email segmentation is based on past behavior—what people have bought, where they have visited, what their interests have been—predictive analytics in email segmentation takes us into the future. Predictive models analyze large data sets to predict what customers are the most likely to buy, do, or enjoy. Then those predictions can be integrated into your campaigns.
Cross-channel Integrations
Cross-channel email automation capabilities allow you to integrate data automatically from non-email sources into your email segmentation decision-making and processes. This all goes back to the idea that the more we know about a customer or our audience, the better we can segment and personalize our emails.
Marketing automation platforms that support multiple channels let you use data from non-email channels to create or adjust email segments. They also let you include non-email channels in your overall nurture campaign. Combining channels—for example social media engagement, a follow-up email, and a personalized in-app message to the same person in a comfortable timeline is a great way to meet your customer where they are at—across multiple digital platforms.
If you need help identifying how to adopt more feature capabilities with your email marketing automation tools or review existing email marketing processes for efficacy, Cimarron Winter can help. Reach out and let us know how we can help you automate your processes and activate segmentation (or more!) in an approachable and affordable way.