50 Email Segmentation Strategies You Need To Use in 2023

Do you want to increase your email open rates, boost your click rates, and decrease your unsubscribe rates? Then email segmentation is the way.

Email segmentation can drastically improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.

Statistically speaking, segmented campaigns average 46% higher open rates, and segmented, targeted, and personalized emails generate 58% of all revenue.

Smart marketers know the value of email list segmentation, but many need help to use it effectively.

Therefore, in this guide, you’re about to learn how to segment your email list and get a huge leg up on your competitors as we share 50 email marketing segmentation strategies that the pros use to create targeted email lists.

So whether you’re starting to use email list segmentation or would like to use it more effectively, we have 50 email segmentation ideas for you.

But first, let’s answer the question, what is email segmentation?

What Is Email Segmentation?

Email segmentation is a technique that email marketers use to send highly targeted emails by dividing their list up into smaller groups, or “segments.”

By understanding the specific characteristics that differentiate each segment, email marketers can target different segments by tailoring the content of their email marketing campaigns to each segment. This email segmentation strategy significantly increases conversions.

The difference in tactics is like how a shotgun and a sniper rifle operate. The former blasts away broadly and blindly hope a few pellets hit. The latter tracks, targets, and precisely hits it.

You want your marketing campaign to be as precise as possible so the right message can hit the right people at the right time. For this, email segmentation is an absolute must.

Now that we have answered what email segmentation is let’s look at a few best practices.

Email Segmentation Best Practices

Everyone’s business is different, so how you segment your email list will differ from how someone else segments it.

However, there are email segmentation best practices that can help you segment your list correctly and effectively:

  1. Email Segmentation Software: First, you’ll need an email service provider that allows you to segment your list. We’ll share our recommended services below.
  2. Page-Level Targeting: Next, you’ll need a tool that will allow you to create targeted email optin forms for specific website visitors and then add them to the appropriate email segments. You can do this with OptinMonster, which we’ll describe in more detail below.
  3. Lead Magnets: Finally, you’ll need to create some lead magnets that will allow your website visitors to self-identify as belonging to one of your segments. We have a huge list of lead magnet ideas here if you need help creating effective lead magnets for email marketing segmentation.

Here are the tools that we recommend for the job.

Email Segmentation Tools and Software

As we mentioned above, you’ll need an email service provider that allows you to segment your list. You’ll also need a tool that will enable you to create targeted email optin forms and add them to the appropriate email segments.

The email service providers we recommend are:

For your optin forms, OptinMonster is by far the most powerful solution.

OptinMonster’s page level targeting module allows you to display unique optin offers based on the visitor’s location and interaction on your website.

For instance, if you want to show a specific lead magnet only to visitors reading blog posts from a specific category, you can do that.

Once you’ve captured their email address with a high-converting lightbox popup or another OptinMonster campaign, OptinMonster integrates with your email service provider to add new subscribers to the appropriate segment(s).

For the best bulk email services to reach a wider target audience, check out the Top 10 Best Bulk Emails Services in 2023.

Are you ready to start segmenting your email list?

Great! Here are 50 email marketing segmentation strategies that the pros use.

1. New Subscribers

Don’t neglect your brand new subscribers by taking their email addresses and leaving them in the cold. Instead, give them a warm welcome with a welcome email.

Simply add an exit-intent popup to convert abandoning website visitors into email subscribers. Then engage with them to convert them into customers.

Lululemon uses their welcome email to remind you of the benefits of being a subscriber: you’ll be the first to see the new gear. They also set expectations by telling you that they’ll be emailing you once per week, and they introduce you to their blog.

Lululemon-welcome-email

Crayon’s welcome email helps you to get started with an article for new users. They also recommend some fellow Crayon marketers to follow.

Crayon targeted email for new subscribers

But why stop at just one welcome email? You could even send a series of emails to all new subscribers with the best of your blog content, or show your new app users how to take the first step, and then the next, and the next.

Whatever you decide to do with your welcome email or welcome sequence, make sure that you’re introducing your new subscribers to your best stuff, so you can begin to grow that relationship with them.

For more inspiration, check out these highly effective welcome email examples.

2. Preferences

Amy Gesenhues, a reporter for Marketing Land says, “One area where brands continue to fail is marketing to customers based on their preferences.”

Ask your customers how often they wish to receive your emails, and give them the option to select the type of emails they want to receive. Do they want blog posts updates, discounts, important updates, or all of the above?

Bonobos give their subscribers a chance to update their frequency preferences when they click “unsubscribe” in an email. As a result, Bonobos retains 25% of those subscribers who would have otherwise opted out.

Bonobos Opt Down

3. Interests

Use your data on your subscriber’s interests to curate content that you know they’ll love.

Rdio uses their data on what music you listen to in order to create targeted emails that recommend more music by your favorite artists.

Rdio targeted email based on interests

After signing up for their email list, Skillshare sends you opportunities to enroll in courses that match the criteria you specified when you signed up.

SkillShare Interests

4. Location

Unless people travel across the country or the world to attend your events, you probably don’t want to blast your entire email list every time you have an in-person event in a particular city.

Instead, use your subscriber’s location to send targeted emails to let them know about upcoming events in their area.

99u Local Event geo targeted email marketing

5. Open Rate

Use information about your subscriber’s open rate to segment subscribers who frequently engage with your emails vs. those who engage less frequently.

For example, you could reward your more engaged subscribers by giving them special opportunities, like beta access to your new program before anyone else even hears about it.

Your-Jet-Invitation copy

6. Inactivity

If your subscribers have been inactive for a little while, remind them of the next step that you want them to take.

The Proctor Gallagher Institute segments subscribers who opted in for a free coaching appointment but still haven’t followed through after two weeks.

Inactivity Targeted Email Proctor Gallagher

Webflow uses social proof to draw inactive users back to their platform. They let you know how many new users they’ve had since your last engagement, so you’ll get on the ball for fear of missing out on what everyone else is doing.

Webflow miss you email

For subscribers who have been inactive for a longer period of time, you may want to send out a targeted email to see if they still want to hear from you, or if they’d rather unsubscribe. And at a certain point, you may want to remove subscribers who have been inactive for a long time.

This way, you keep your list fresh.

7. Lead Magnet

Segment your subscribers by the specific lead magnet that they opted in for.

You can do this by creating lists specifically for your lead magnets with your email service provider. Then, you can design your campaigns in OptinMonster and send subscribers directly to that list:

Email Provider Lists

Or you can go directly to your email service provider to add tags to certain email segments of your list. Here’s what that would look like in Constant Contact:

Add Tags in Constant Contact

You can add tags to certain email segments of your list depending on which campaign they opted into. Manually adding these tags may seem a bit cumbersome at first, but it will pay off in a big way.

Plus, once your tags are created, you can add them to your OptinMonster campaigns to easily add leads to just the right segment.

Kobo does a good job at lead segmentation. After downloading a free preview of an eBook, they send you an email inviting you to purchase the full version.

Kobo targeted email

This is a highly targeted email because it is going to people who have already expressed interest in the product.

8. Lead Magnet Type

Everyone learns in different ways. Some subscribers may prefer to attend your live webinars, others prefer to read your summarized PDF reports.

When you segment your subscribers based on the type of lead magnet that they initially opted in for (and any additional types they opted in for later), you can continue to give them the type of content they like best.

9. Opt-in Frequency

Some of your subscribers opt-in for one of your lead magnets, while others may opt-in for multiple lead magnets.

Create a segment of subscribers who opted in for more than one lead magnet, and you’ll know who is most likely to want to hear about any new lead magnets that you have coming out. Then, you can notify that segment about your new lead magnets without pestering your other subscribers.

25-free-ebooks
Image via Flywheel

10. Abandoned Form

How about targeting visitors who started to fill out a form on your website, but never completed it?

For example, you may have a web app with a free trial that requires a signup. A certain percentage of your visitors are going to start to sign up and then either change their minds or get distracted. You can recover those signups by sending them an email reminding them to finish the process.

Just make sure that the first step in your signup form is to ask visitors to submit their email address, or use the WPForms Form Abandonment Addon to automatically gather emails even if they never hit “submit.”

11. Abandoned Shopping Cart

Shopping cart abandonment is a common issue for eCommerce sites. Thankfully, you can use win back email campaign to re-engage those shoppers.

Here is a fun example from Bonobos. The main call-to-action in this email is to “Finish the Job” (finish checking out). The secondary call-to-action is to reply and talk to a “customer service Ninja” with any questions or if you need help.

Bonobos-Abandoned-Cart-Email

For more inspiration, see our roundup of the best abandoned cart email examples.

12. Didn’t Buy

Perhaps your visitor missed out on an opportunity to buy something altogether. For instance, you may have launched a product for a limited time, and now they’ve missed the window of opportunity to buy.

What is the next step for these subscribers? The first thing you may want to do is send them some really valuable free content, to remind them of why they wanted to follow your brand in the first place. Maybe they didn’t buy because they don’t know your brand well enough, or they don’t have enough trust for you yet.

Build a stronger relationship with these subscribers, and the next time you have something to offer they will be much more likely to buy.

13. Purchase History

Use your customer’s purchase history to offer cross-sells or up-sells.

For example, the Dollar Shave Club sends you an email before the box you ordered is set to ship, while you still have a chance to add on more items. Why not toss in a few more while you’re at it?

Dollar-Shave-Club-Your-Next-Box-Email-copy

14. Amount of Purchase

Segmenting your customers by the amount of their purchase allows you to offer them an appropriate up-sell on the backend.

You can also give special treatment to customers with especially large purchase amounts by offering them a free “thank you” gift, or some other bonus that will reinforce in their minds that they made a good decision by buying from you.

15. Type of Purchase

Especially if you offer a lot of different types of products, segmenting your customers by purchase type is a great way to determine what their interests are so you can offer curated products that you know they’ll love.

Here’s an example of a curated email from Fab, an accessory shop.

Designer-Spotlight-MVMT-Watches

If you want to learn more, read 8 Product Recommendation Email Examples to Drive Sales.

16. Purchase Frequency

Reward your frequent shoppers with a special coupon just for 3rd time buyers, or an invitation to join your loyalty program.

On the flip side, you use targeted email marketing to encourage one-time customers to come back for seconds.

17. Buyer Satisfaction Level

When you get a new customer, do you ask them the following loyalty question: “On a scale from 0-10, how likely is it that you’d recommend us to a friend or colleague?”

You can use their answers to segment your list based on Net Promoter Score (NPS), or those who have a high score between 9-10 (“Promoters”), a medium score between 7-8 (“Passives”) and a low score between 0-6 (“Detractors”).

18. Purchase Cycle

Certain purchases have a cycle: they are seasonal, or they occur at certain times. Knowing where your customers are in their unique purchase cycle can guide your email marketing campaigns.

For instance, let’s say you sell diapers, and one pack usually lasts for one month. When the customer is probably starting to run out of diapers (say, 21 days after their purchase), you might send them a friendly reminder email asking them if they’re ready for a new shipment.

19. Stage in Sales Funnel

Each subscriber’s stage in your sales funnel should determine what email they receive next.

New subscribers need to be nurtured. Warm leads need to be primed for the sale and eventually sold. Customers need to be presented with cross-sells or upsells. Every stage should have its own unique email marketing campaign.

20. Change in Engagement

Sometimes people simply get busy and they stop engaging with your emails like they used to. This can happen no matter what you do. However, if you don’t do anything to re-engage those subscribers, you could lose them forever.

Duolingo is sensitive to the fact that you’ve probably been busy, so when you haven’t logged in for a while they send you a targeted email with the call-to-action to take a 5-minute lesson to get back on track. Anyone can spare 5 minutes, right?

We Miss You Duolingo Email

21. Change in Purchase Behavior

Particularly if you offer a monthly subscription, or you have a product that needs to be re-purchased on a regular basis, you should check in with customers when they change their purchase behavior.

If a customer cancels their subscription, you might want to send them an email to ask them why. Even if you don’t get that customer back, their answer will help you to improve the experience for future customers.

22. Mobile vs. Desktop

Online consumers are increasingly using their mobile devices for eCommerce. And while you may be optimizing your content for mobile, are you segmenting your email list for it?

If the answer is “no,” you may want to rethink your current email segmentation strategy. The email reading experience is completely different depending on whether you’re reading on your mobile phone or your desktop.

mobile-email-marketing-12-638-e1462552862759

Most email statistics point to the growing trend of accessing inbox from mobile devices. EmailMonday sources several stats backing this up, showing that 61.9% of email opens occurred on mobile in 2019.

This trend is expected to continue, meaning that responsive email design will be more important than ever, so make sure you’re segmenting your list based on your subscriber’s device. And don’t forget, you should target your popups and opt-in forms to your mobile audience as well!

Here’s an example of an email campaign by Domino’s. The desktop version is on the left, and the mobile version is on the right:

dominos-mobile-emailImage source Selligent

23. Type of Email Account

If you want to refine your email design more, you can segment by the different email clients that your subscribers use.

Perhaps an even better use of this segmentation, however, is to interpolate what other services your subscribers have along with their email provider. For instance, HubSpot suggests asking everyone who has a Gmail address to add your blog to their Google Reader.

24. Affiliates

Do you have an affiliate program? Don’t forget about your affiliates! Nurturing that relationship will really pay off, so make sure you have specific email campaigns just for them.

For example, you could run a contest for your affiliates and offer a big prize to whoever has the most sales over the next 30 days. You can even send email updates to your affiliates as the contest progresses, showing off the “leaderboard” of affiliates who are currently in the Top 10.

zubbit_leaderboard

25. Subscribers Who Referred You

Maybe you don’t have an affiliate program, but you do have subscribers who referred you to their friends. These are highly valuable subscribers who should be treated with special care, so give those people a special tag.

Once tagged, you can give these evangelist subscribers a special “thank you” gift, an exclusive discount, or VIP access that no one else gets. Let them know how much you appreciate them for spreading the word about your brand, and they will show you undying loyalty.

26. Customers Who Haven’t Left a Review

Your customers can be your best brand advocates, but only if they take action by sharing their experience.

Customers who haven’t left a review yet can be sent a targeted email with a friendly request to leave a review. TradeGecko does an excellent job of this by first complimenting the customer, then making their request to leave a review, and closing the email with another compliment.

TradeGecko-Leave-a-Review-Email

27. Brick-and-Mortar Customers

If you have both a brick-and-mortar plus an online shop, segment your customers by where they shop. That way, you can provide specific information to your brick-and-mortar customers about in-store only promotions.

28. Customer Lifetime Value

Do you have different customer profiles who are worth more or less over their lifetime as a customer? Be sure to segment those out so that you can really focus in on those customers who are worth the most over the long-term.

For example, you might have one segment of consulting customers who hire you to give them advice, and another segment who hires you to provide them with high-end, done-for-you services. The done-for-you customers have a much higher lifetime value, so you may want to give them some special treatment.

29. Website Activity

Monitor your subscriber’s activity on your website so you know exactly what they are looking for.

For example, Canopy takes your personalized data collected from their website to curate very specific items for you. Not only that, but they tell you the exact criteria they used. It’s like they read your mind!

Canopy-Website-Behavior-Email

30. Website Inactivity

You can also use website inactivity to segment your email list and get those users back on task.

Handy flags users who got a free credit, but never actually claimed it on their website.

Handy-Reminder-Email

And Dropbox sends you an email when you sign up for their service but don’t follow through with the install.

dropbox-not-installed-email copy

31. Web Store Visit History

Use your website visit data to send targeted email campaigns to subscribers who visited your web store or your sales page but didn’t purchase.

For example, you could let them know that the offer is about to expire. Or, you could offer them free shipping or a free bonus to sweeten the deal.

Free-Shipping-On-Your-Huckberry-Order

32. Buyer Persona

Most businesses have more than one buyer persona. These personas usually have different needs and respond to different copy, so why not send targeted campaigns to each?

You can create targeted email lists by separating your subscribers into various buyer personas by looking at what they’ve opted in to, what they’ve clicked on inside your email campaigns, and their behavior on your website. Use that collective info to create email segments for each of your customer profiles.

OptinMonster’s page level targeting makes it easy to segment by buyer persona. You can use display rules to target specific buyer personas with a specific opt-in form, and then automatically add those subscribers to a segment on your email list.

OptinMonster page level targeting

33. Job Title

What does your subscriber do for a living? Are they a designer or an art director? Are they a salesperson or a customer service representative?

Each job title has different pain points which can be addressed separately with segmentation.

34. Seniority

When it comes to making the decision to purchase your product or service, your subscriber’s seniority in their company often plays an important role.

For example, a busy manager may want to know that your solution is something that they can delegate to their employees. On the other hand, the employee will need to have compelling reasons to give their manager for making the purchase, since their primary motive is to make their manager happy.

35. Skill Level

How skilled is your subscriber at the discipline you’re trying to help them with? Are they a complete beginner or fairly proficient? Or are they already advanced, and looking to take their skills to an even higher level?

The content you send to your subscribers can vary greatly depending on the skill level of your audience. So knowing what level to speak to them can be extremely helpful for your campaigns.

36. Birthday

Segmenting by birthday is a nice thing to do for your subscribers, and it makes them feel special.

By sending them targeted emails with special offers, or even just a simple “happy birthday” note, you can connect with them on a much more personal level.

As you can see in this example from Facebook, you don’t necessarily have to give them anything except a friendly greeting. After all, who doesn’t like to be remembered on their birthday?

Happy-Birthday-Customer-Email-from-Facebook

37. Weather

Does weather play a role in your subscriber’s behavior? Use what you know about the weather in their area to entice them to take the action you want.

For example, Airbnb sent the following email to a segment of their subscribers who live in parts of the United States that they knew were experiencing chilly weather. The email entices subscribers to take a trip with copy that reads, “Woke up on the wrong side of the cold front? Jack Frost is back. Skip town soon.”

Localized-Promotional-Email-from-AirBNB

38. Psychographics

What can you deduce about your subscriber’s psychographics from your data?

Psychographics are traits like personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. If you know what makes your subscribers “tick,” targeting emails to them will be so much easier and more effective.

You can collect your data from lead magnets downloaded to clicks and website activity to “profile” your subscribers by psychographics and send them targeted emails that focus on just what they need from you.

39. Event Attendance

Use your data on who attended your events to send segmented campaigns.

For example, you could keep track of people who attended your webinar vs. those who registered but never showed up.

Or, you could have a segment of subscribers who attended your in-person event so you can send them photos from the event and notify them about the next one you have coming up.

40. Business Industry

If you collect industry information about your subscribers, you can tailor your email content so it is highly relevant to them.

Perhaps you have written a blog post about how to market your business. When promoting that blog post to your email list, you could send one email to your real estate subscribers that explains how this blog post will help them get more clients. You could send another email to your restaurant owners that explains how your blog post will help them get more customers through the door, and so on.

41. Business Type

If your subscribers have their own business, you can segment by the type of business they own.

Are they an eCommerce or a brick and mortar, a franchise or a non-profit, or an enterprise or a small business?

Each business type has its own unique needs that you can specifically address by segmenting.

42. Survey Respondents

If you sent out a survey, send something special to those who participated.

They will be glad to know that you respect and appreciate the time they took out of their day to help you out!

Nathan Barry Thank You Email

Image Source: ConvertKit

43. Membership Expiration

Is your subscriber’s free trial about to expire? How about their membership that’s almost up? Let them know that it’s time to upgrade or renew.

Here’s an example from Apple Music. They make it super easy for you by allowing you to “Turn On Automatic Renewal.”

Expiration-Apple-Music-Email

44. Webinar Attendance

Segment subscribers who registered for a webinar by whether or not they attended. That way, you can re-engage those who didn’t attend with an opportunity to register for the encore. Or you can simply give them a brief summary of what they missed.

You can also segment your webinar attendees by how long they stayed on the call. Those who stay for the entire presentation might get a special bonus download, whereas those who drop off early might receive a survey about why they had to go, or what caused them to lose interest.

45. VIPs

Reward the top 1% of your email list in terms of engagement and purchase activity with something exclusive, just for them.

Muzli makes their subscribers feel special with an exclusive sneak preview and early bird registration, before the official launch (which doesn’t happen until the following week):

Muzli-users-exclusive1

And yes, you can segment your email list by demographics too…

46. Gender

If you have different offerings for men and women, go ahead and segment your subscribers by gender.

Adidas sends out two completely different email campaigns. You’ll get one or the other depending on whether you’re male or female.

Content by Gender Adidas

47. Age

Sometimes segmenting by your subscriber’s age can be important in relating to them better.

For example, Derek Halpern segments his subscribers by age when they take his Entrepreneur Assessment Tool. Then, they get an email with a story about a like-minded entrepreneur who is also close to them in age:

Derek-Halpern-Entrepreneur-Assessment-Tool-Result

48. Income

Segmenting your subscribers by income can be helpful.

For instance, some subscribers need different information depending on their current income. If your subscribers are small business owners, one segment may want to learn from you about how to grow their 5-figure business to 6-figures. Another segment might want to know how to scale from 6-figures to 7-figures. Yet another segment may just want to know how to make their first 2K month.

49. Level of Education

In some cases, it may make sense to segment based on the level of education.

For example, if you’re an educational institute, you may need to send different content and promotions to subscribers whose highest level of education is a High School diploma, versus those who have earned their Bachelor’s degree and are looking to get their Master’s.

50. Employment

If you’re a career coach or a recruiter, you may need to segment based on employment. Your groups might look something like this: 1) subscribers who want to change careers, 2) subscribers who are unemployed and looking for employment, 3) subscribers who simply want to “climb the corporate ladder.”

That’s it!

50 smart ways to segment your email list. If this list seems overwhelming, don’t worry: you don’t need to use all of these ideas. Just choose one or two to start. You can keep referring back to this list as your needs grow and your email marketing campaigns become more sophisticated.

But as you grow and start to segment your audience, you may want to add a small twist to your current marketing strategy to gather information on your leads.

How Segmentation Surveys Fit into Your Current Strategy

Where does a segmentation survey fit in your current strategy

You now have 50 ideas on how to intelligently segment your audience. Some of this information you can track down yourself. Things like open-rates, purchase history, cart abandonment, and other metrics can be found through your analytics tracking software.

But some information is trickier. You need to ask your customers directly, which begs the question:

How do I get that information about my audience so I can appropriately segment them?

Yeah… that’s a big one. Fortunately, there’s a really easy strategy to do that. It’s called a Segmentation Survey.

And it’s awesome.

What Is a Segmentation Survey?

A segmentation survey is a small questionnaire that you have current or potential leads fill out to put them into appropriate segmentation lists. In other words, these are surveys that you use to find out more information about specific segments of your audience.

When your customers or leads fill out this kind of information, you can better organize your email list and create more targeted campaigns.

But first, we need to figure out how a segmentation survey fits into your marketing funnel.

Where to Embed a Segmentation Survey in Your Marketing Strategy?

Where does your segmentation survey fit in?

When it comes to asking your audience to fill out a segmentation survey, the right place depends on where you are in your marketing strategy.

There are three situations that change where you add your segmentation survey:

  • You’re just starting out with no email list
  • You want to organize a current email list
  • You want to segment new users while updating your current email list

Let’s take a look at all three.

Scenario 1: You’re Just Starting Out and Don’t Have an Email List

This is the easiest scenario for adding a segmentation survey to your marketing strategy. Why? Because starting from scratch means you can organize every new lead you get right from the start.

Adding a segmentation survey in this situation is a lot like building an application funnel, but with one major difference. Here’s how it works:

Build a standard optin campaign with a solid lead magnet to get your traffics’ email address. Unlike an application funnel, you aren’t going to ask your clients to fill out your segmentation survey before you have their email address.

That’s because an application funnel is designed to qualify the right kind of leads for high-ticket sales. In this case, however, you want as many leads as possible to nurture those relationships over time.

So the most important thing is to make sure your survey isn’t losing leads due to form abandonment.

Once you’ve got the user’s email, you should send them a welcome email (that has the lead magnet in it). This is where you redirect them to a segmentation survey. You can do this in two ways:

  • Make them fill out the survey to access the lead magnet
  • Deliver the lead magnet and request that they fill out the survey

There are positives and negatives to both strategies. The former will lead to more surveys being completed but may reduce the user’s experience (UX). The latter method will likely get fewer survey completions but improves UX.

It’s really up to how aggressive you’d like to be.

NoteFor the best of both worlds, you can offer a second lead magnet in the welcome email as an incentive to fill out the segmentation survey. This leads to a high survey completion rate and keeps a positive UX.

From there, you can take your leads’ responses and put them into the right segmentation lists for future email campaigns.

Scenario 2: You Already Have a Large Email List You’d Like to Segment

This scenario is a little trickier because you likely won’t be able to segment a big part of your audience. It depends on how engaged your email list is and how responsive they typically are to your emails.

That said, even properly segmenting 10% of your email list is better than nothing!

In this case, you’ll want to develop a small, exclusive lead magnet as an incentive for your audience to fill out your segmentation survey.

Now, we know what you’re thinking:

Seriously? All that work just so I can get a little more information on my audience?

But you need to think of audience segmentation as an investment. By organizing your audience into specific groupings, your campaigns will be more targeted which will, of course, increase sales.

So spend a few hours and create a new lead magnet to reward the part of your audience that fills out your segmentation survey.

Once you have a killer lead magnet in place, you’re all set! Shoot out a special email to your entire audience to offer your new lead magnet.

Then take the information from the responses you received and sort your users into their appropriate segmentation lists.

Scenario 3: You Are Actively Getting New Leads and You Have a Large Email List

If you’re not a type-A person, this isn’t a fun place to be. Right now, you’re constantly injecting random leads into a disorganized email list.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just let the chaos grow!?!

Yes. But we promise, sorting everything out will be totally worth it. And the good news is that if you’ve read this far, you already know exactly what to do!

It’s just a matter of completing both scenarios we saw above.

So first things first, you need to rework your lead capture campaign. More specifically, you should rewrite your welcome email to include the segmentation survey just like we saw in Scenario 1 (above).

Again, it’s a good idea to create and offer a new lead magnet to encourage users to take the time to fill it out.

And the great thing is that you can use this same lead magnet to entice your current email list to fill out your segmentation survey.

From there, you can create a simple email campaign to get your current list to fill out your segmentation survey, as well. This is what we just described in Scenario 2 (above).

As you get your current listed properly segmented, you’ll already have a system ready for putting new leads in the right place. After a few hours, all of your current leads will be organized for more targeted email campaigns.

But there’s just one last thing we need to look at before calling it a day…

How to Create Segmentation Surveys

Making a segmentation survey will vary from company to company. In other words, there is not a “one-size-fits-all” template here. It depends on what kinds of information you need and how you want to organize your customers.

However, we can totally help you through the process, even if we don’t know exactly which questions you need to ask. In this article, we’ve listed 50 ways to intelligently segment your audience.

Looking through those options, you can choose the top 5–10 pieces of information you need.

From there, you can start building your survey using the software of your choice. We recommend going with WPForms, for a couple of reasons:

  • It’s easy to use
  • You can embed the survey directly on your site

Here’s how it works. Head over to WPForms in your WordPress dashboard and click Addons:

WPforms Addons

In the Search Addons field, type Surveys and Polls Addon:

Surveys and Polls search in WPForms

Then click Install Addon and then Activate:

Activate Survey Form addon

Once it’s activated, you need to go back to create the form. Head to your WordPress dashboard, click WPForms and then Add New:

WPForms Add New

Choose Survey Form:

Choose Survey Form Addon

Now you’re ready to build your survey!

Create Your Survey Form

For more detailed information on this topic, check out their guide on how to easily create a survey with WordPress.

Plus, you can easily discover the exact location of your website visitors with WPForms’ Geolocation Data addon. The Geolocation Data addon will display a Google map alongside your form submissions so that you can see each visitor’s country, state, and city information.

wpforms geolocation data addon

This makes segmenting your email list by location a breeze. Here’s how to add a Google map to your forms with WordPress.

That post has everything you need to know to create a personalized segmentation survey.

Now you can embed the form anywhere on your site! Again, we won’t go into how to embed your form in this article, but WPForms has you covered with this tutorial (and don’t worry, it’s super simple).

As your responses come in, you’ll be able to create highly organized and targeted segmentation lists within your email service provider.

If you’re reading this, that means you’re definitely serious about creating the most targeted email campaigns possible. And now, we want to hear from you:

Which ideas do you use for email segmentation? Are there any that we missed? If so, let us know on Facebook or Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

And if you’re interested in even more killer tutorials, head over to our YouTube channel. Just don’t forget to subscribe.

But before you’re able to segment your audience, you need to get their emails! And that’s where we come in ?.

Get started with OptinMonster today and start converting more visitors into subscribers and customers!

Hello, I'm your guide to the WordPress universe. With a knack for plugins that elevate websites and a mastery of SEO, I'm on a mission to educate you on how-to WordPress by summoning up captivating content that enchants readers and climbs the SERP.

Comments

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  2. List segmentation has been in my experience and of our clients the most important factor to increasing clicks, sales, conversions, and also brand authority and respect. Because through segmentation and being able to email specifically per someones action, it allows a closer relationship with customer. Loved this one!

    1. Nathan Thompson
      Nathan Thompson March 5, 2021 at 11:00 am

      Totally agree! So happy you enjoyed the article and thanks for reading 🙂

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