Email List Segmentation

Have you ever wished you could send a unique email campaign to a small "sub group" of your list (instead of to the entire list)? For example, maybe you wanted to send a special offer to subscribers in one ZIP code. Or only to subscribers who are females. That's called list segmentation. Email marketing experts use customer list segmentation to send very focused email campaigns that are more relevant to their customers. The idea is that the more relevant the campaign is to your subscribers, the better your response rates and return on investment. Customer list segmentation is common in the direct marketing world. But when it comes to email marketing lists, it usually required some heavy-duty database machinery (and a big marketing budget) to accomplish.

With MailChimp, you don't have to be a rich fat-cat marketing genius to create list segments. We make it super easy for anyone (even complete beginners) to segment their email lists and send targeted campaigns. Best of all, it's free to all MailChimp customers. Check out our list segmentation video demo.

A Quick Example of Customer List Segmentation in MailChimp

Let's say you run a website for people who love food. When people subscribe to your email list, they can specify what kind of foods they like. For example:

Send Special Offer: Win 50 lbs of Steak
Now you and one of your major advertisers want to send your subscribers a special offer for a huge 50 pound box of meaty, delicious ribeye steaks. Yummy. Look at that marbling. Mmmmmmm.

Anyway, instead of blasting it out to your entire list (and potentially offending the people who checked off "vegetarian" or "vegan" when they signed up), you can define a more appropriate target segment:

Sending the campaign to people who aren't vegetarians or vegans is pretty simple. But the really cool feature here is the ability to also target the campaign to subscribers who responded to a previous free offer.

Ways You Can Segment Your Email List with MailChimp:

Here are a few example segments you can create with your MailChimp managed lists (tip: you can actually combine multiple criteria below to get really targeted with your list):
 

You Can Segment A List To:	Why You Should Try It
Send a campaign to people within a specific interest group.	You can provide more relevant content than when you send "general interest" newsletters to everyone. For example, a website for car fanatics can send an email about the newest Ferrari only to people who like sports cars (and not to people who like fuel-sipping hybrids).
Only send to people who subscribed within a certain date range	So you can send your newsletter to your most recent subscribers, who might have missed your previous campaign
Send a campaign to people who clicked a link (or opened) a previous campaign	Use this option to send followup campaigns or event invitations to people who expressed interest in a previous campaign. Note: this requires MailChimp's AIM Reports tracking add-on.
Send to subscribers within a specific domain name	If you have a group of customers in one company, you can target them by domain name. Or, test your delivery to yahoo.com, aol.com, etc.
Send to subscribers who did NOT open a recent campaign	Maybe your subject line wasn't very intriguing, or got your campaign spam filtered. Use this technique to send a followup campaign to non-openers with a different subject line. Note: this requires MailChimp's AIM Reports tracking add-on.
Send to people in specific states, ZIP codes, etc.	If you collected "ZIP codes" as a field on your signup form, you can send special, locally specific offers to your customers based on that field (or any field, for that matter).
Send to members whose birthdays are in a certain month	Include special gifts if they print out the email and bring it into your store (you can even pre-schedule birthday campaigns for the entire year).
Send to email addresses on your list that contain or do NOT contain specific text	Narrow your list down to members of one organization, or exclude everyone from one company (like your all your competitors who are signed up on your list).

How to define a segment in MailChimp

Defining the criteria for a list segment is super easy in MailChimp:

1. Log in to your MailChimp account (don't have an account? Sign up for a free trial here)
2. Click the "Create Campaign" button.
3. Select your email template.
4. Pick your list. On this step, choose the "Send to a segment of this list" option.
5. Use the pulldown options to define the segment.

Cool idea: Use segmentation to send automatic birthday emails to your customers

Other Resources About Email List Segmentation:

• Email Segmentation for Success - iMedia Connection
• Segmenting and Targeting to Improve the Bottom Line
• Optimize E-Mail with Segmentation, Frequency and Different Message Types
• Segmentation and targeting (list of resources at Email-Marketing-Reports.com)
• Why Segmentation Makes Sense
• Email Segmentation for Small Businesses (advice from Gail Goodman of Constant Contact)
• Segmentation: Learning From Best Buy

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