One of the reasons that digital marketing is so powerful is that it allows us to target our message to the right person at the right time. When it comes to email marketing, if you’re still blasting all your messages to everyone in your audience, you need to stop now. Instead, you need to figure out how to deliver the right email to the right person at the right time.

How do you do that? Well, it’s simple and complicated all at once. The simple answer is you need to segment your list, which will help you understand the journey that people are on. Figuring out how to segment is the real magic.

If you’re an online marketer, you need to have certain segments to keep track of the people on your list and how they interact with you so you can serve them well.

Struggling with email marketing? Learn how to do email marketing the right way in my course, BADA$$ Email Marketing. You can get FREE access to my email course inside BADA$$ Online Marketing University.

3 Different Segments That Every Email Marketer Needs

Let’s start by breaking down the basic segments that every online marketer needs to have.

Weekly Emails Segment

You need a segment for your weekly emails. These are the people who will get the standard weekly emails you’re sending out. In my case, I send two weekly emails. One is on Tuesday for the release of my podcast, inviting people to listen. Then another one on Friday, which is a roundup of marketing tips and resources I came across over the week, along with a roundup of the content that I put out that week.

Customer Segment

You need one or more segments for customers that have purchased your product. If you only have one product, you’ll have one customer segment. If you have 600 products, you need 600 customer segments.

You need to be able to know that this subscriber has purchased XYZ products because you might need to send an email to them about an update on the product. Or you might need to exclude them if you’re promoting a product that they already bought. Sometimes you may need that segment for a new product. Having customer segments lets you decide who to send an email to, as well as how to tailor your messaging.

Freebie Download Segment

This segment allows you to know which of your freebies people download and if they’re interested in different subjects. Just as you might want to send an email based on what people bought, you might want to send an email specifically to people who have signed up for a single freebie because they would be particularly interested in a certain product or another freebie.

Other Segments Based On Your Business

The above segments are ones all online marketing should have. Depending on your business, you might want to have some of these other list segments too.

Different Customer Avatars

If you have different customer avatars, you need to have segments for them as much as possible. For example, I serve course creators, coaches, membership owners, service providers—knowing where a person falls helps me speak to them.

If I know someone is a course creator, I might want to talk to them if I run a promotion of my course creator’s legal pack, which is a pack of legal templates designed for course creators. If I know someone else is a service provider and doesn’t have a course, I don’t want to send that promo to them because they don’t care about that.

Customer avatar segments allow me to target promotions to the right people. So you see how this can be valuable.

How you do this is flexible. You segment them through a quiz as they sign up for your list. Or you can do segmenting every once in a while, where you ask people to let you know what they consider themselves.

Stage In The Journey

Segmenting based on the stage your people are on in their journey can also be valuable. For example, in my business, some people are just starting out and haven’t done anything. Some have put something out there but aren’t making money. Some are making a little bit of money, but they’re not really making enough to cover their expenses. Others are making a good amount of money and are looking to scale or build a team.

You can see how knowing those different things will help give me a sense of how to talk to these different people. Beginners might be interested in my legal templates, those who haven’t done anything yet might not be interested in team building, and those who are already established might not need to receive an email from me promoting the importance of having website legal policies in place.

Level of Engagement

Are people hot, warm, or cold? Now you don’t have to get too detailed, but you generally want to know if people are engaged, opening your emails, and clicking links. Or are they cold, meaning that they haven’t engaged with any of your emails?

You’ll find this type of segment quite useful in various ways. You’re going to send more emails to people who are more engaged because they’re loving your stuff, they like you, and they want to hear from you. People who are cold may not want to hear from you and eventually, you’ll scrub them off your list entirely if they don’t engage.

Inactive Leads

If you’re actively cleaning up your list, you’ll have a segment of inactive leads. These are the people who are still on your list but didn’t unsubscribe or say, “No, don’t talk to me.” But you’ve made the decision you’re not going to email them because they’ve been inactive. They simply haven’t opened or engaged.

You might still find this list valuable if you want to target them with some ads where you can try to get them back and engaged again.

Access Levels

If you have people who have access to certain membership sites, whether they’re a customer or not, you need to track that with segments. In our system, for example, we use Access Ally for our BADA$$ Online Marketing University and for our legal templates. We have a tag and a segment for everyone based on everything they have access to, whether they paid for it or not so that we know and can adjust.

Promo Engagements

During a promotion, you’ll often want to track the level of engagement. So if you’re doing a seven-day promotion and you’re sending multiple emails, you can track how engaged people are. Are they opening your email and visiting your sales page? Are they clicking through? You’d want to focus your efforts more on those who are engaged. After the promotion is over, you’ll get rid of this segment.

Start Tracking Data

When you start tracking this data, you can get granular with your messaging and send people the right message at the right time. It will trigger the right things based upon what they’re doing and that’s powerful.

Make sure that you’re segmenting and keeping this data so that you can tailor your email marketing and have maximum impact. Don’t feel overwhelmed, though! If you’re just starting out, you only have to focus on the top three segments: customer lists, freebie downloads, and weekly emails. The more that you track from the beginning, the easier it is if you set up a process so that it happens automatically in the background.

If you’re enjoying this and you want to learn more about email marketing, my course BADA$$ Email Marketing is completely free. Just head over to BADA$$ Online Marketing University (BOMU) and sign up.