All businesses need to use different forms of marketing to connect with their current and prospective customers. It’s a way to let people know about their products and services, as well as the latest news from the company itself. Doing this by email is a popular choice for many brands – so why do they use list segmentation for their email marketing campaigns?

Although it sounds like you might get better results by sending all your marketing emails to each of those people who have signed up to your mailing list, you’ll get much better results by using list segmentation. These are some of the benefits for including this in your email marketing strategy.

Better communication

Promotions or communications are dependent on segmentation targeting and positioning because a brand’s communications need to be accurate for its target market. You need segmentation if you require a target market: you can’t communicate if you don’t know your target market.

For instance, if you’re asked to explain politics to someone on the other side of a curtain, you may think about speaking of ruling parties, politicians and states. However, the other person may be a young child: you may wonder if it’s worth going any further. This shows that by knowing about a customer’s demography, psychology and your market segment, then you can create your message.

Improved customer retention

You can encourage customer retention through the customer life cycle by using segmentation. You can see this in the airline and automotive industries, for instance, as well as customer life cycle segmentation in hospitality – such as hotels.

Using Titan as an example, its products are planned through the customer life cycle. This brand has its products by price segment as well as life cycle segment – meaning that there’s a watch available for any customer, no matter how old they may be. You can then apply this to your list segmentation strategy.

Build relationships

There’s a four-step process you can use to get the most out of your email list: create, analyze, update, repeat. Following this at each step means you can build and communicate relationships with your customers. Not only can you improve your return on investment, but also generate more leads and get useful data on how you can improve your marketing campaign. The four stages are:

• Create: produce personalized emails with great content, calls to action and marvelous subject lines to send to different segments within your email list
• Analyze: look at analytics plus items such as most clicked links plus open rates and hours to collect useful data
• Update: your analytics data can support you to boost campaigns based on what did and didn’t work
• Repeat: once these changes are in place, go through the process again to see if these improved sales, leads or ROI

There are many other reasons why list segmentation is an essential part of your email marketing strategy. Have a look at yours to see what you can do to boost your scheme – and, before you know it, you’ll see some of these results, and more, having a positive effect on your business.