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Email Marketing Segmentation: What is it? & Why it Matters
In today’s digital marketing landscape, personalisation is the key to capturing your audience's attention — and email segmentation is the driving force behind it.
Gone are the days of sending out generic, one-size-fits-all emails and hoping they resonate with everyone on your list. It’s simply not enough anymore. With an informed understanding of email segmentation, you can break down your subscriber base into focused, relevant groups, delivering targeted content that speaks directly to their needs, preferences, and behaviours.
Ready to unlock the full potential of your email marketing strategy? As a market leading data insights company, we’ve created the marketer’s guide to email segmentation for higher engagement and ROI.
What is email segmentation?
Email segmentation is the process of dividing and grouping your email list into specific audiences to deliver exactly what each audience wants. Instead of sending the same catch-all message to every one of your subscribers, email segmentation allows you to break down your audience into smaller, more focused groups based on things like their interests, behaviours, location, or even past purchases.
Using this approach allows you to send tailored, highly relevant emails that speak directly to each segment's needs and preferences. The result? More engagement, higher open rates, and a much better chance of turning subscribers into loyal customers. Email segmentation isn’t just smart, it’s essential for cutting through the noise and making sure your emails stand out in crowded inboxes.
The benefits of email segmentation
A successful email marketing campaign is measured in open rates, clicks and conversions. After all, the main goal is to convert subscribers into customers — preferably high value customers.
- Maximise campaign performance: Personalised content resonates more with subscribers, increasing the likelihood of opens, clicks, and interactions.
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Improve deliverability: Highly relevant content decreases the chances of your emails being marked as spam, improving overall email deliverability rates.
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Tackle unsubscribe percentages: Subscribers are less likely to unsubscribe when they receive content that feels relevant to them. Targeted, personalised messaging helps build stronger relationships with your customers, keeping them loyal over the long term.
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Increase ROI: When you send targeted content to segments based on behaviour or interest, you're more likely to see an increase in conversions.
If you're looking to get the most out of your investment, email segmentation solutions can help you achieve better campaign results by delivering content that's more relevant and personalised to specific groups.
9 ways to segment your email list
There are countless ways to dice up your email list, but here are some of the most powerful and popular segmentation methods that really deliver results:
Demographics are so simple they’re sometimes overlooked, but they’re an effective place to start and build out from. Demographic segmentation involves dividing your audience based on characteristics such as age, gender, income, education, or occupation. For instance, you could create different campaigns for younger versus older customers or male versus female subscribers.
Further to this, you can segment your audience based on various demographic factors, depending on what products or services you offer. For example, if you sell home fitness equipment, your target audience might range from individuals in their 20s to seniors looking to stay active. At the same time, you may need to tailor your messaging by gender, especially if certain products cater to specific needs for men or women.
Geographic segmentation is based on the physical location of your subscribers. This type of segmentation is particularly useful for businesses with location-specific offers, or those that operate in multiple regions. This type of segmentation can drill down into different languages, countries, postcodes, cities, or time zones.
For instance, a restaurant chain may send specific offers to customers near one of their locations or promote seasonal products depending on the weather in the customer's region.
Psychographic segmentation is a powerful strategy, based on the lifestyle, values, attitudes, and interests of your customers. It’s powerful because it digs deeper into what motivates or appeals to your subscribers beyond basic demographic or behavioural traits, giving you the opportunity to know them on a personal level.
Our psychographic profiling solutions bring the people behind your email list to life through profiles that power marketing activity. Our data has been mapped to open social media profiles to determine the type of person posting and what motivates them.
Leveraging this data can help you tailor your products and services towards your existing or desired customer base in a way that speaks directly to their wants and needs.
Behavioural segmentation focuses on how a customer interacts with your brand or products, including purchase history, email engagement, and website activity. It allows for highly targeted and relevant messaging.
E-commerce stores, for example, can create segments based on past purchases and send related product recommendations to customers who have purchased similar items.
Engagement-based segmentation groups subscribers by how they interact with your emails. This can include email metrics found on most email marketing platforms, such as open rates, click-through rates, or lack of engagement, to help you understand your email list’s level of interest in your brand.
You might create a segment of highly engaged and high lifetime value subscribers to receive exclusive offers, while sending re-engagement campaigns to inactive subscribers.
The term ‘customer lifecycle’ refers to the stages a customer experiences when evaluating, buying, using, and staying loyal to a product or service. So, in other words, where the customer is in your funnel.
Your funnel provides valuable insights into your marketing strategies. For instance, if you see a significant number of customers exiting at a particular stage, it’s a signal to review that point and identify what’s causing them to leave without converting.
Customer lifecycle segmentation involves segmenting your audience based on where they are in the customer journey — whether they are new subscribers, current customers, or past customers. Messaging can be tailored to nurture leads, reward loyal customers, or win back lapsed customers.
For example, a SaaS company could use their customer lifecycle segments to send onboarding emails to new users and upgrade offers to long-term customers.
Segmenting by purchase history allows you to send tailored offers based on what a customer has bought previously, their average order value, or purchase frequency.
Email marketing in this way means you’re in a better position to know the kind of things specific groups of existing customers are interested in, and, therefore, what they’re likely to be interested in in the future. It’s similar in logic to the ‘customers who bought the item also bought…’ sections on the product pages of ecommerce websites.
A customer who frequently buys children's toys could receive recommendations for related toys or promotions for upcoming holidays like Christmas or birthdays.
This type of segmentation relies simply on what your subscribers have explicitly stated as their interests or preferences when signing up for your email list (if they have been so kind).
If you were in the business of travel and tourism, for example, you could offer subscribers the choice to opt into receiving emails about beach holidays, city breaks, or adventure trips.
If you’re in the B2B space, certain segmentation methods won’t always hit the mark because your customers' needs are different from those of an individual consumer. But when you’re selling to other businesses, an effective way to segment is to do so based on their industry or company size.
Let’s say you run an IT services company. You could divide your audience into segments like small startups versus larger enterprises. You might offer specialised content for tech startups looking for cost-efficient solutions, while targeting established corporations with advanced security services. By tailoring your message to each segment’s unique needs, you ensure your content speaks directly to the challenges they face.
How to create email segments
Hopefully, you should have a few ideas on the types of email segments that would work best for your audience — now it’s time to put them in action. Building segments starts with collecting and organising key data about your subscribers.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to get you started:
The first step is gathering the information that will help you build the meaningful segments you need. You can collect data from various sources, including:
- Signup forms (e.g., ask for demographic info or preferences)
- Purchase history
- Email engagement metrics (open, click rates)
- Website analytics (e.g., which pages they visit)
- Surveys or quizzes
- Databases
As the market leading data insights company in the UK, we know how crucial data is for successful marketing. Which is why we provide a complete email marketing database solution, offering businesses high-quality contacts along with advanced customer analytics and insights for precise targeting. All of our data is sourced from the UK’s most comprehensive and compliant databases, ensuring your campaigns are set up for success.
Once you’ve collected the necessary data, you’ll need to determine how to group your subscribers based on your marketing goals. Consider how each group may respond differently to your messages by asking yourself and/or team questions such as:
- Who are my/our most engaged subscribers?
- What are the common characteristics of my/our most loyal customers?
- Are there customers who have not engaged in the last 6 months?
Defining your segments, although valuable, can be both time and resource consuming in the short term. Once all the hard work is done, it can be difficult to know the segment groups you’ve chosen will be the most effective for your business goals. Our segmentation services for marketing saves time and removes the uncertainty, dividing your customer data into targeted sections, helping you identify relevant customer groups based on specific variables.
Our solution can tell you who your best customers are, the characteristics they have in common, and much more. Transform your data into knowledge, and knowledge into profitable action using Intra, our advanced segmentation tool for a bespoke segmentation implementation.
Now that your segments are defined, it’s time to develop content for each unique segment. It’s so important to keep your segments in mind while you’re designing and writing your emails, so that they speak directly to the group’s unique interests, needs, or behaviours. Creating customer profiles for each segment might be useful to you.
For example, you might need to adjust the tone of your message, the offers you present, or the call-to-action you settle on, depending on whether the audience you’re targeting is Gen Z, or Baby Boomer.
Once your first round of emails are sent out, you can start measuring the impact of your segmentation accuracy and campaign quality. Track the open rates, click-through rates, and conversions for each segment to determine its success.
It doesn’t stop there — continue to test your messaging, campaigns and segments over time to ensure you’re effectively targeting the right audience using the right criteria.
Best practices for email segmentation
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Start small: If you’re new to segmentation, begin with simple categories (e.g., gender, location) and gradually add more advanced segments (e.g., behaviour or interests).
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Avoid over-segmenting: Too many small segments can lead to unmanageable lists and may cause dilution of your message. Focus on the most meaningful segments that will have an impact.
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Keep lists up-to-date: Regularly clean your email list and update segments to ensure you're sending relevant content to subscribers as their behaviours and preferences evolve.
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Test and refine: A/B test your campaigns across different segments to determine what works best. Experiment with subject lines, content, and offers to optimise performance.
Get the most out of your consumer data
Email segmentation is a game-changer when it comes to making your marketing more relevant, personalised, and impactful. By tapping into your audience's demographics, behaviours, and preferences, and applying smart segmentation strategies, you can boost engagement, drive conversions, and strengthen customer relationships.
When you follow best practices and use the right segmentation tools, your email campaigns become more focused, effective, and primed for success.
We can help you craft a powerful email marketing strategy, complete with advanced segmentation techniques to maximise engagement and deliver real results.
