#12. 3 Easy Email Marketing Segmentation Strategies To Try Today | Podcast

Vira: 0:16

So the company started sending her promotions about, hey, you are like four months pregnant or three months pregnant. Here are the supplements for you. Here’s the something. And the dad was like pissed off. He was like, no, my daughter is not pregnant. Oh my gosh. Why would you send it if you know your customer really well? Believe me, segmentation is the name of the game.

Alissa: 0:58

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Email Einstein. Vira and Alissa, Here we are, two email marketers at an email marketing agency called Flowium. We are so passionate about email marketing and because we love what we do, we want to share our insights with you. Flowium is one of the fastest growing email marketing agencies in the world and we specialize in providing a premium, full service, e commerce email marketing experience for all of our clients. And our service is tailored specifically for your business and is designed to help increase your online retail revenue by 20 to 50%. Deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. And that’s what we’re all about here at Flowium. And we’re going to get started. We’re on episode number 12. I can’t believe it.

Vira: 1:44

Oh gosh. Episode 12. It feels like yesterday. Do I sound like I’m in my 70s already? Like it feels like yesterday we were starting this podcast. Well, today we will be talking in depth about delivering the right message to the right person at the right moment. Because today we will be talking about the segmentation. And I feel like this has been the most probably requested topic for the podcast because segmentation is huge. And that’s something that we’ve learned over the years here in Flowium that like here we believe that success in email marketing comes to comes down to two things, automation and segmentation. And we have already covered automations in some of our previous episodes like episode number two, getting started with email marketing. But today we’ll get down to the nuts and bolts of the segmentation and segmentation is great. Segmenting your list helps you to be more relevant. It allows you to be talking to your customers in their language and giving them what they want to get from you, giving them the information that they want to hear from you at the best time possible. And when you do the segmentation right, the payoff can actually be huge. According to mailchimp. And here my favorite part of the podcast, when we are shouting some like random impressive numbers. Well they are not random of course, but this number is just like get me every time. So according to Mailchimp, the open rate for the segmented list is almost 19% higher and the click through rates for the same list are like 22% better. And here comes my very favorite number. Marketers who use segmented campaigns know that as much as 760% increase in revenue. So they, they, they’ve noticed like a 760% increase in revenue. It sounds crazy to me, but yes, it does work. And that said, like figuring out the segment a bit difficult, especially when you are just like starting with email marketing or when you’re starting with e commerce. So in this podcast we’ll be covering some of the very like basics of the segmentation and this is something that everyone should do and basically we’ll explain some of the basics and we hope that it will help you with your open rates, with your click through rates and of course with your revenue. So but before we go there, here comes another favorite part of the podcast for me. It’s a pro tip of the week. Something like a little actionable tweak of the week. Maybe we should call it this way.

Alissa: 4:33

Oh, I like that.

Vira: 4:35

So something little that you can like, try and see how it will affect your like bottom line. So Alissa, what’s the pro tip of the week?

Alissa: 4:43

So with the holidays coming just around the corner, there are a lot of brands within the e commerce world who are kind of testing preliminarily some different holiday offers and different ways that they’re going to kind of talk to and approach their customers. One of the things that we would strongly recommend and you can either test now, starting now, a sort of higher level and then leading into the holidays, you can kind of do this with a little more of like execution goals kind of in mind is to ab test your holiday offers. So this is actually something that I’m planning on doing for one of my newer clients in their email marketing strategy. But one of the things that we see do really, really well is testing a discount percentage versus a discount with actual dollars off or money Off. So a great example that actually Vira had provided before is for some you offer them $5 off, and then for the others you offer 10% off and see what people kind of bite with more. So if they’re purchasing an item that’s $100, obviously the $5 off is going to be more beneficial for your brand. But typically we see people biting on the dollars off than they do the percentage off. For whatever reason, people see a dollar amount and they think, oh, that’s money in my pocket, I’m going to go with that offer. But if you do the math, and this is kind of a pro tip for customers, if you do the math on these kinds of offers, figure out which one is better for you as the customer, but for the brand, the dollars off makes more sense. So do some tests like that. And also, if you’re not really into discounts as a brand, you could also potentially offer a freebie. So that’s one thing that we’re doing with my newer client. We’re kind of a b testing free shipping versus free adding kind of like an additional little item that doesn’t really cost the brand very much at all to kind of add into their order. So that’s something else that you can do if you don’t already offer free shipping. But there are different ways that you can kind of test holiday offers that you’re planning on kind of putting into place come the holidays. But I would recommend kind of testing that on a lower level right now and then seeing how it goes and trying to implement that kind of stuff later on again as the holidays are here. So that’s our pro tip for the week.

Vira: 6:54

That’s, that’s actually a good one. I was so surprised we were cross selling this product for one of my clients. It was something like one $20 cream, like a night cream or something, or like a serum or whatever. It was $120 and they were offering 10% off versus $5 off. So basically, like 10% off from that product is almost double of the $5 off. But $5 off for some reason performed better. And like, people don’t do math. And definitely, definitely try it. It may even affect your bottom line, like how much money you’re making on that, on that actual product. So that’s, that’s all exciting. That’s one of my favorite part of our jobs, like split testing different things and to see what actually works and whatnot. It’s like the best playground in the world. Okay, let’s talk email marketing segmentation. Yeah, we should we need to have like a dramatic entrance here? Because this, this topic has been like requested a lot of times. I feel like that’s like the biggest pain of all of the new email marketers and the biggest pain of all of the people who are just starting with E Commerce. That’s probably like the first thing that our clients are coming to us with. Like help me with the segmentation. And of course, of course we do. So email marketing segmentation, we think about it or we call it the art of thinking about customers and groups. And if you, if you look at your email list, your list consists of like different kinds of people with different behavior, different age, different purchasing habits, different interest. Maybe even if your subscribers are so different, why treat them all the same? And that’s like the approach that we are using. The solution here is to be splitting your email list into smaller groups that are alike. And here we call them segments. You can call them whatever they want, whatever you want. But the idea is to be like splitting your list into this like smaller, smaller groups and personalize your communication them. So you slice this email list into smaller segments based on what you know about each of your users. Like who they are, what they are. Purchasing behavior is like how familiar they are with your brand, how much money they make, how much money they spend, how often do they purchase something from you when they are check their emails and stuff like that. And this is all the information that you can collect through email marketing. And this is the information that you have to utilize when thinking about the segments. And the better you segment, the higher conversion is. So here are some fascinating numbers. I didn’t realize that the segmentation was so powerful. So in a recent study done by Klaviyo they have analyzed thousands of E commerce brands that they work with. And here’s an interesting dynamic that they have noticed. On average companies with annual revenue of under 100k so like under 100,000 doll per year they had around 13 segments. And like this are like the considered one of the smallest businesses that Klaviyo worked with. So the brands with annual revenue of over $100,000 to 1 million, they had 29 segments on average. Companies with million to 10 million annual revenue had a proc. On average 43 segments. And here is my favorite one. The companies with more than $10 million in revenue had an average of 133 segments. And I know that this number. We don’t want to intimidate you, we don’t want to scare you, but this is just shows you the power of segmentation power of understanding your list well. And it may be tempting to think that if you email, if you blessed enough people, they bring enough revenue to your company and you can even make up for the decrease in click through rate and open rates and stuff like that. But in reality just by looking at this number you can see that there is like a clear dynamic between like how well you segment your list and what’s your like overall revenue is. So the strategy batch and blast is not your best bet probably. So in this episode we’ll go over some of the simplest yet probably some of the most powerful segmentation techniques and strategies and we’ll start with the most fundamental one. So Alissa, the very basic of email.

Alissa: 11:24

Marketing, so the most basic of basic, basic of basic segmentation kind of strategies that we use is making your segmentation based on engagement. So engaged versus unengaged. So as Vira has just mentioned, sending emails out to just everyone all the time is not a good strategy. You will get junk boxed, you will decrease your deliverability scores and ultimately you will just send a bunch of emails that people don’t care about. Which as always takes us back to that relevance aspect of things. We need to send out relevant emails to relevant people. So here at flowiam, one of the things that we do almost immediately when we start with a new account or working with a new client is we create an engaged segment and then also an unengaged segment. But what do these segments look like and why do we do this? So the engaged segments we start off with are defined based on whether a subscriber has opened an email, just opened, not clicked through, within the past 90 days. If your subscriber has engaged with an email your brand has sent within the last three months, we see them as a recent interactor with the brand and they get plopped into the engaged segment. As for everyone else who is not, but also has not unsubscribed from your emails, they go into the unengaged segment. So they’re still there, they’re still alive kind of in your klaviyo. They’re not suppressed, they’re not unsubscribed, but they’re not people that we’re going to be targeting all our energy towards because they haven’t engaged with you in the last three months. You’ve been sending out emails, you’ve been doing your job, but you’re clearly not sending out the emails that are relevant to these people. And so what we do is we kind of put them on the back burner and the idea is to hopefully over the course of time create more segments where you can start to re engage people. That’s a different kind of more advanced form of segmentation. We won’t get into that today, but that is something to just keep in mind is you can look at ways to re engage this unengaged segment. And again that’s a totally different, totally different tangent. So the engaged segment that we do create is reviewed on a monthly basis by our account managers. So if you’re seeing a consistent 25% or higher open rate for your campaigns within the last 30 days, we expand the engaged segment by X number of days. I personally prefer adding on 20 to 30 days to this expansion. So I’m going from like 90 to around like 110, 120. Vira, I don’t know what you usually do for when you expand your segments.

Vira: 14:13

Same I’d say we usually start with something like 60 days. So we like define engaged segment as customer who opened or clicked your email like at least one email within 60 days. So within two months. But if we see that the open rates are like 35%, 40% or something, it means that we can play a bit with that like segment definition. And we like, we can increase it maybe to 90 days or even 220 days. And also there is this little thing that you have to keep in mind. There are some business that are businesses that are very like seasonal. Like that brand Alissa you’ve worked with like something like this about the seeds and like farm stuff. Oh yeah. So yeah. So maybe for that kind of brands you can also maybe change the definition of the segments because for some brands people are only like coming like to them to buy something from them like once a year or twice a year or something like that. So this like definition it should be very like specific to what you do. But I think that 60 days is like a good start because if person like haven’t opened anything from you for like two or three months, what are the chances that they really want to hear from you? It doesn’t mean that this people are like dead to you and you’re removing them from your list. It just means that they maybe don’t want to hear from you as much. So you can still send them like some good promotions or like holidays campaign like everyone expect to get something from you around the holidays. So yeah, so that’s, that’s sort of like the strategy that we are using.

Alissa: 15:47

Yeah, yeah, no, and it works really well and I have a client that I’m working with at the moment who? Their engaged segment has been so successful that we’ve now expanded it to, I think it’s 180 days, which is awesome. And the open rate is still like over 30% every time. So when we originally started with them, they were blasting out to everybody in their newsletter and their open rate was something at like 15% or whatever it was. We cut the engaged segment and then it started to increase a little bit more and it was at around like anywhere between 20 to 25%. Then it started to steadily go way over 30% and now we’ve started to increase and it kind of dips back a bit, but then grows again. And so that engaged segment, you have the ability to let it grow and you’re growing it organically and naturally. In a way, Klaviyo kind of applauds you for you get brownie points with Klaviyo. But also you’re not bothering people. You’re only sending to people who actually care about what you have to say. So it’s definitely something that we, we highly recommend. Now on the flip side of things, if you do see start to see the open rate decline and go under 25%, we typically decrease that engaged segment, which I’ve personally never had to do myself. Vira, I don’t know if you’ve had any experience with that on your end for your clients.

Vira: 16:59

Well, usually we try to first change something with maybe the subject lines and preview text. And if it doesn’t work, then we can make it smaller the segment, but then we will be watching the dynamic and we can make it higher again. But Alissa, I really like that example of yours that you just mentioned about the segment being really big. But unfortunately we have seen a lot of cases when people are coming to you with I don’t know, 1 million subscribers. Subscribers, not 1 million, but still like with super big list, but only like a super, super small, small amount of people on that list is like engaged. So that’s something that we had to work with as well. And I think we just like recently had like an issue like this. The list was like 120,000 or something. They had only like a few thousand engaged. So that’s why like the system always was sending them to the spam boxes and stuff like that. So watch out for that engaged unengaged thing. That’s minimum that you can do, but it will help you tremendously with your senders reputation, with your open rates, click through rates and even revenue. Actually.

Alissa: 18:14

Yeah, no, and I think, I don’t know if you’re talking about the same situation that I am. But we. We did recently have an issue where Klaviyo actually blocked a client’s account. Because we had initially sent a campaign to a very small list of engaged subscribers. It was like just over a thousand, I think it was. They had over 150,000 subscribers. They wanted to just batch it out to everybody. And we were like, no, this is not a good idea because they had a brand new Klaviyo account. So we sent the initial campaign and had great metrics, great results. And then the client kind of pushed us to send a second campaign to a much larger segment. So we ended up sending the campaign out to over 20,000 subscribers. Within two days of sending that second campaign, the Klaviyo. The Klaviyo account was blocked and we couldn’t send any emails for two weeks.

Vira: 19:05

Yeah, really careful.

Alissa: 19:07

It’s. It’s just one of those things where it’s like the natural tendency is to try and email as many people as possible. It’s not a great method because you do get punished for it. And just because you sent out to 20,000 uninterested subscribers, now you can’t send to anyone for two weeks. And that hurts you way, way more than sending to a smaller engaged segment that’s going to grow organically over the course of time. You just have to kind of have patience with that. But yeah, so that is for segmenting based on engaged and unengaged segments. Just making sure that that’s something. And again, as we kind of preluded with this is. This is like the basic of the basic of the basic. If you’re not going to do any segmenting, this is one that we would strongly urge you all to do because. Because it’s so important and it’s so crucial and it will affect how you’re able to interact on Klaviyo and how much you’re even able to use your account. So definitely really, really important and it’s.

Vira: 20:03

Really easy to set up. Even my grandma can do it. Honestly though, it’s super easy to set up and it will work in magic for you guys. So try it for sure.

Alissa: 20:12

For sure.

Vira: 20:14

Okay, so big segmentation strategy number two. Actually I will be covering like a few mini strategies in this big one. But the second type of segmentation is to be splitting your email list based on the purchasing behavior of your customers. So if a person on your list has purchased something from you before, you can use the data about like what the person have purchased when they purchase, like how often they purchase to send Them emails catered to something that like interests them. And there are a few ways to slice your email list based on customers previous purchasing behavior. So the first one, like a big one is to identify what is interesting stink to them and to identify those upsell opportunities. I call this segmentation strategy. Would you like fries with that? You know, it’s like in McDonald’s they are the gods of upselling. I can’t, I can say no to them, to those like charming people. So the easiest way to segment by previous purchases is to start sending out emails recommendations for like similar items or maybe similar like accessories that would go well with their previous purchase. So if executed successfully, this segmentation strategy can increase your average order value. It can help you with like customer retention and it can actually even create the awareness about the other products that you are selling. So for example you’re selling sofas like you’re sending the furniture or something. You can say something like hey, you just, just bought this beautiful sofa. How about this matching coffee table? So this is like a segmentation strategy that you’re using or something that I’ve done for my customers. So they have purchased the serum for lashes and now they can, you can upsell them the serum for brows so they have like the entire package. So this is a great strategy because again you can create a lot of awareness about your like other products that your brand sell and also you will improve your or increase your average order value a lot. Now something that you can also do and especially if you’re selling like some products that require failing or replacement. So you can send the emails that targeting your customers potential needs. So for example if you are selling the supplements and that’s I’m using the example of my own as well. So you’re using the supplement and make an educated guess of like how long will that like a bottle of supplement will last. Them say they need to get a new supplement box like every 60 days or so. Then on day 50 you can say them, you can send them something like reminding like hey, your order needs to be like refilled soon. Here’s the product. You can even offer them the discount. We had this really like good example. So one customer of mine, they are sat, they are selling probiotics. So they are like different kind of probiotics. And that’s something that I like didn’t, didn’t actually realize. So turned out that you need to be like rotating the probiotics that you are taking. So you have to be like taking a different kind of probiotics and like different times of your life. So say if you purchase like probiotic 200, it’s like the dosage or something, you’ll be needing to switch to like a lower dosage in like X days. So that’s what we did. We actually targeted those people who purchased say this product like two months ago. And we know that they are next step in their like a therapy will be purchasing like this, like a different kind of Probiotic. So we upsell them this product and again it all comes from knowing your customer and they are like sort of like a journey really, really well. So another big thing that you can be doing, and that’s something that we’ve done successfully for many, many years. So you can segment based on average order value. So average order value segmentation can do like magic as well. So this way you’ll be able to target different people based on how much money they are willing to spend on your products based on their basically budget. So don’t try to push Bentley. If your customer came to purchase like Toyota Prius, right? It’s just like this offer will be like relevant to them. Maybe over time you can build their relationship and you can convince them that hey, come and buy Bentley, but right away, no, that’s not your best bet. On the other hand, there are customers who are coming to you specifically to purchase Bentley. So we call them like VIP customers or they came to you and purchased. They are like 9th Prius in like 60 days. So we call them VIP customers and we create this like segment that we are calling the VIP customer segment and we are like treating them a bit differently. So every brand has this like a bunch of most loyal brand enthusiasts and if you don’t, you’re doing something wrong or you are in the wrong business. So every, every brand has this like VIP customers who are like crazy about your brand who are coming back for more and more. Why not to ask these people for their opinions? Why not send them exclusive campaigns and discounts and like allow them to help you build that like community and to nurture your brand. So can define this VIP segment in like many different ways. So I don’t know Alissa, about you, how you define VIP segments with your clients, but for my clients we mostly do like person is considered vip. If they are average order value is like three times bigger than the normal average order value for, for the brand. So that’s the first way how we define them. The second big one is, is that if they have purchased like X time within like the last 12 months, say if you’re like, typical customer’s behavior is to be purchasing something like twice a year. And this guy. So they came to you and they purchased like five different things in five different times. They are your VIPs, they are your most loyal customers. And alternative way to define the segment is the historic value as well, so how much money they spend over the years with you. So that’s another. Another big one. Do you say, do you have any, like, VIP segments that you’re utilizing with your clients? Is that something that you do?

Alissa: 26:40

So I’ve wanted to do this for a while with some of my clients. The place that I kind of get stuck is what kind of content are we sending out to them and the kind of perks that we’re providing. Because most of my clients are actually very against discounts. They don’t love doing the discounts accounts unless it’s like special event, special holiday, or Black Friday. So for me, it’s like, okay, we know who our VIP customers would be. It’s just trying to understand how we would engage with them. That’s my stuck at the moment is trying to figure out how to do that. But typically what we look at is we look at order, average order value, and then also how much they purchase within the last 12 months. So if they’re like a serial purchaser and they’re just going for it every month, then for us it’s like, okay, this is the person that’s really kind of tacked on with us. The other one that I really like is the historic value over a certain dollar amount. It just kind of shows that they have that kind of longevity of customer commitment to your brand and the loyalty, which I think is huge. And those people definitely should be rewarded in a sense or even recognized, you know, so one of the things that I’m trying to push kind of with my clients is like, okay, if we don’t have any methods of like, offering perks, why don’t we just recognize these people and say, like, hey, we just want to thank you. Like, we see you, we know you, we love you, we understand that you love our brand, and we just want to honor that and let you know that, like, we recognize you and we are working on some kind of initiative to reward you or whatever it is. So. And I know that there are a lot of loyalty programs that offer that too. Like, if any of you listening work with Swell or YATPO or you have clients that, that work with them on that side of things, things for loyalty programs, they do have VIP tiers that they create internally within their loyalty program and then they kind of provide options with how to recognize and reward those members who are considered VIPs within the swell program. So it’s definitely something that’s very popular and very common with most clients. I, for whatever reason, I’m just having a hard time getting the next.

Vira: 28:36

Just like you mentioned, not, not everyone is open. Open for like to. To. To discounts. And I know that when clients of ours results we actually had the podcast with them. So go, go back and listen. That was a really good podcast. I know that they. It’s episode four. Oh, episode four. Look at you girl. You know everything by heart. Maybe you are our VIP listener. Yeah. So go back and listen to episode number four. They don’t do discounts either. So they are not a discount company as well. But what they do, they have this, still have this like a VIP club and they give them early access to some like limited edition products or they are giving them like limited access to products that no one else can get access to or stuff like that. And they are sending them different like questionnaires to get to know them and the brand better. So that’s actually the great opportunity for you to talk directly to your customer. And there is this another big brand. I think they are the Klaviyo partners as well. They call the Ministry of Supply. It’s not the client of ours. I’ve met them on the conference last year and they basically build their entire brand around this like VIP thing. And they even have this program when they fly their VIP clients to meet the CEO of the company, like to have the lunch with the company’s like the CEO or the like the main team. So they have this group of the most like loyal ambassadors of the brand and they are meeting them in person or inviting them to company retreats. I know it’s a bit like, it’s a bit like much but that’s something they have been doing really, really successful. So this are the ambassadors of the.

Alissa: 30:17

Yeah.

Vira: 30:19

Of their business. Yeah, yeah. So this is definitely the group of people that you cannot ignore. And for my clients I even set up like a different VIP flow. So say every time the person have placed their say fourth order they are starting to go through, through this like a special post purchase flow for them. So we have like a different kind of content there and we are sending different questionnaires and like a special discount that they can share with their friends and family and stuff like that. So this one has been working really well for us as well. So another big one, another big group that probably most of the brands have is the holiday shoppers. And like, with the holidays coming, you cannot ignore this segment at all. So this is a quite a big and often overlooked segment for many brands. We call them holiday shoppers and basically what they are. These are the people who are only coming to your website once, maximum twice a year to purchase something with a discount. So most of the time they are your like unengaged customers, but you still cannot ignore them. So define the segment and start maybe like warming up the segment before the holidays to just like remind them about your existence. Right, yeah. So I mean, as we already mentioned probably like gazillion times, these are all the very basic, basic strategies. And just like to refer back to that numbers, the companies with more than $10 million in revenue, they have an average of like 133 segments. So we will not be covering obviously all of them. So these are the very basics. But the next one, I feel like an important one as well. So Alissa, what is the next. Next, like a segmentation strategy?

Alissa: 32:06

Just before we move on to that, I like that you mentioned that holiday shoppers one, because that’s one that I’ve been talking about with one of my clients. They sell wine online. Wine awesomeness. Check them out if you’re listening. And it’s amazing. They have a great business model. The way they do things is really cool. They’re a great brand for people who are trying to understand wine and for wine drinkers. But they do have a huge amount of subscribers that are on their list that are unengaged, but that they know for a fact, come around every time it’s the holiday season, because people need to buy wine for whether it’s Thanksgiving or their Christmas parties, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, whatever it is. And so we were actually talking a couple weeks ago about creating that holiday shopping segment and just trying to figure out, okay, how do we want to define it? What do these people look like? And then what are the campaigns and kind of the flows that we want to put these people in and at what time, you know, so that’s definitely one that I would strongly, strongly recommend because I think it applies to a lot of brands. Even if you don’t think it, it probably applies to you in some way, shape or form. For sure.

Vira: 33:07

Especially this year, it will be big as well. Because I’m just like referring back to our podcast number 11, where we talked about the holiday season 2020. A lot of brands are actually starting the promotion sooner this year, like mid Oct, October, November, just because this holiday season might be like the biggest season ever in the history of E commerce and people just want to spread that like a purchases and everything over the next months or so. Just like so we are not putting a lot of strength on that shipment and everything. So yeah, so you can start thinking about it even now. Define your holiday shoppers, define your holiday segments and start working on it as soon as possible.

Alissa: 33:59

Yeah, yeah. Because if you’re, if you’re not planning on starting until like mid November or, sorry, mid October, you’re probably starting too late. Mid November is like so sorry, we’ll see you next year. But anyway, so for number three, we have determined segmentation based on demographic. This is an interesting one because this isn’t one that I do personally a whole lot, but mainly because the brands that I work with are pretty applicable kind of across the board. They either have like a very niche kind of audience and so we don’t need to worry about kind of splitting it up too much, but we’ll get into that. So one of the beautiful things about Klaviyo is that it’s a database that stores tons and tons and tons of information about your subscribers, their behaviors and their actions. So we’ve already talked about, talked a bit about segmenting based on actions. So whether they’re engaged or unengaged, their behaviors, especially when it comes to purchasing behaviors. But what about who they actually are? So if you’re selling a niche item or targeting a niche audience or demographic, then this method of segmentation may not be entirely useful for you and your brand. But as more brands look to expand their selections and offerings and catering to a wider audiences, segmenting based on demographic can be highly beneficial. I’m going to mention only two popular attributes for subscribers that are more commonly recognized by Klaviyo, but the sky is the limit on how you can diversify these segments. Honestly, the one of the, one of my favorite things about Klaviyo, even though I don’t know how to do it personally because I’m not a techie developer kind of person, but you can create custom properties, you can integrate custom APIs, you can create custom metrics. There’s so many ways that you can can customize Klaviyo and how they do things for you, and it’s just, it’s amazing. So the sky’s the limit with everything that you do in Klaviyo, but. And I would definitely recommend exploring it based on what your brand is looking to achieve. But let’s start with the first kind of sub set of demographics. So the first is location. So this is mainly focusing on segmenting your audience based on their geographic location. So there are a few different ways that you can do this. Whether you segment based on country, city, state, region. If you want to get really funky and really creative. Again, like I said, you also have the option to create custom properties in Klaviyo that can be applied to your subscribers based on the information they share, such as the climate that they live in, the population of the area that they live in, whether they live in a rural, suburban or urban area. Again, the possibilities are endless. So question is, why would we do something like this? So if you are a brand with a larger national or even potentially international market presence, you’ll have different customers in different regions that have different needs, different wants, and just function in an entirely different way because they’re dealing with different cultures altogether. So for example, if you have a US audience versus a UK audience and Vira, I know that you were kind of dealing with this a little bit, we found a workaround on this. But the language and the tone that you’ll use in your emails will look entirely different. In the uk they do sarcasm very differently to how we do it in the us. So if some of your emails are a little more sarcastic and kind of punchy in tone and you try to send a US based email to a UK audience, it’s going to go over their heads and they’re either going to think that you’re crazy or you’re being rude, which you don’t want to do. And not to mention the currency conversion obviously. So, so when you send emails to the US you’re going to be sending them in dollars and to the UK you’re going to be sending them in pounds. But that’s more of like a, an obvious, you know. The other kind of example is if you have customers that live in South Florida, where I’m at, where it’s literally 90 degrees all year round, and then you have others that live in northern Minnesota where they deal with winter a lot more, you’re probably going to avoid sending out an email to a person like me that’s announcing the launch of your new parka, which is going to help stave off the cold. But you’re definitely going to want to send an email about that new launch announcement to a person in northern Minnesota. So it’s just about kind of understanding, okay, what does my entire demographic look like? Where are there kind of subsets of that demographic and what do I need to be doing so that I can be selling relevant emails to relevant parts of my audience, because again, as always, it goes back to that relevance side of things. Things. But on the flip side of things, if you’re a small business with a limited budget, you are probably going to send focused emails to the defined area where you’re targeting your customers versus spending money essentially on approaches for people outside of that market. So this example I’m about to give is just a sort of example to kind of project the idea of what we’re talking about. But you can get a lot more granular with it. So there is a local company here in South Florida. It’s actually based in Delray, which is the city just north of where I live in Boca, by about 15 minutes. They have an enormous Instagram presence, and I’m sure that they have followers from all over the country who also buy their products all over their. All over the country. However, one of the initiatives, one of the things that they do is they have this feature called Local Lovers, which is basically where they take people who are local to South Florida couple and they photoshoot these couples together wearing their clothing and things like that, which is awesome. But they would be a total waste of time for them to send an email about Local Lovers asking for people to volunteer for this photo shoot to a person who lives in Wisconsin versus a person who lives here in Boca. It just doesn’t make sense. They’re wasting time, they’re wasting energy, and that person in Wisconsin is gonna be like, dude, really? Like, I live in Wisconsin. Don’t send me this. You know, so it’s just stuff that you want to think about whether you’re a large business or a smaller business. It’s making sure that you’re catering to the correct kind of audience with the correct kind of message, which is such a.

Vira: 39:40

Such a great idea. This, like, local. Like utilizing your local fans.

Alissa: 39:45

Right? It’s great, right? It’s really good.

Vira: 39:47

And one of the publicity and.

Alissa: 39:49

Yeah, exactly. And they tag. Exactly. They tag these couples on Instagram. It’s great. They do a very, very good job. And they also just touch, kind of continue to brag on this company. So it’s called Hubs and Hers. If you are local to South Florida, this is where they’re based. And they do an amazing job. They do like a vintage launch every now and again where they have like 50 pieces that they’re. That they’re specialty printing. It’s like one of each. It’s super limited. They do like a whole, like, get ready. They do this countdown and Everything, literally within three minutes everything has gone off the site. Like it’s like, like the vintage launch. Every time it launches, within a couple minutes everything’s gone. So if you didn’t get it, you’re not gonna get it. And it’s cool because they have this huge sense of urgency that’s driving a lot of their sales, which is awesome. A lot of the stuff goes, goes out of stock really quickly whenever they launch new product. It’s. They do a really good job, especially catering to their local market. So just making sure that if you are a smaller business and you have a huge local presence, you’re really thorough focusing on your local customers because they’re going to do a lot for you and they’re going to be able to kind of support you in a very local, kind of grassroots way, as opposed to someone who lives on the opposite side of the country from you. They may still support you, but they’re limited to what they can do. So anyways, that’s the first is the location based segmentation when it comes to demographics. The other one I’m going to talk about is it’s a little bit of controversial, but we’ll kind of go down that route anyway. So it’s gender based demographic segmentation. So as I started to do a ton of research on this, there’s a lot behind it, obviously with kind of gender fluidity becoming more of a, more of a thing in our society. And so brands need to be aware of that and they just need to be cognizant of how they’re sending out these emails. Because just because someone fits a specific kind of attribute or property of demographic, it’s not a foolproof science where it’s like, oh, this person lives in Minnesota and like, that’s it. I’m going to send them only winter stuff. Because what if that person who lives in Minnesota, lives in Minnesota for six, six months out of the year, but then they actually live in Hawaii for the other six months? You know, there’s no way for you to like really, really know a customer’s entire story. And the same applies to gender. So with Klaviyo there, you have essentially two different options that you can kind of choose when it comes to segmentation based on gender. You can actually either create a custom property that a subscriber would need to fill out so that you can determine what their gender is. So when customers have like a customer profile with you or whatever it is, you would set up a custom property where it basically tells Klaviyo, like, hey, this person has confirmed that they are a male or female or that they’d rather not disclose that information or whatever it is. Or you can use the gender prediction algorithm that Klaviyo provides. So before I get into those two options, just to kind of run through the benefits of the gender segmentation kind of method, it’s pretty obvious, but ultimately it goes back to sending relevant emails that target the right kind of customer for the item or product that you’re intending to sell. So aside from the relevance aspect of it, gender segmentation can help you understand the kind of cadence at which you be. You should be sending emails to your subscribers. So with women it’s typically safe to say that they usually have a tendency to online shop a little more than men do do. If you send a really nice email, they are probably going to be more easily targeted by that nice email that’s going to lead them to your website, that’s going to lead them to make a purchase than for men. So with women you could potentially use a slightly more aggressive email strategy in order to sell to them, which can be more effective than with men. With that all kind of said, it’s important to understand the two options, how you can segment based on gender before jumping in head first. So the first first with creating a custom property and having subscribers tell you directly that they are male or female, it’s easy.

Vira: 43:29

Can I make a quick note of that?

Alissa: 43:31

Yeah, yeah.

Vira: 43:33

Because I just like I literally worked with this client who’s selling them like apparel for women, for women and men and how we approach it, we basically created three custom properties. So on that exit intent pop up when customers just like signing up for your email, they can pick the gender like men, female or other. They can pick other if they don’t want to disclose their gender or if they don’t identify them as either. So we have this like two very hardcore gender specific ones and we are, when we are like sending the campaign, say we want to send it only to men, we only send it to people who identify them as men. Because this gender prediction function in Klaviyo although is like great, but we just want to be like super, super safe with it because there’s like a lot of conversation about it in the society and yeah, it’s better be safe than sorry, right?

Alissa: 44:30

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. And there is a slight work around that. So as Vira has pointed out, she would definitely agree. Creating a custom property and getting that information directly from the source is always going to be a safer bet. The only thing to just Remember is that just because someone states that they are male or female, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re only interested in the items that are advertised for their specific gender. So in a Klaviyo article where they talk about the gender prediction algorithm that they have set up, they do provide an excellent example through a brand called James Black. This brand sells clothing for adults and children. And in their gender targeted emails, what they’ll do is, so for example, if the email is going to a woman or geared towards women, it will show primarily women, women’s clothes. And then at the bottom of the email it will say something like, or if you’re interested in other items. And then it will show men’s clothing as well, just to kind of give that, that a bit of a balance. Um, and it’s interesting because the design still looks great, it’s really not awkward. Um, and it shows that the brand isn’t just automatically assuming that just because you’re a female, all you want to see are female clothes. Because you could be a woman married to a man and you’re like, hey, I love James Black. I want to buy my husband a shirt. But I all you’re doing is you’re sending me women’s shirts. Can I see some men’s clothing? So it just provides that kind of counterbalance that you need just to make sure that you’re kind of covering all your bases and being as inclusive as is possible with a brand.

Vira: 45:52

Right, right.

Alissa: 45:54

And Vira, as you had mentioned, Klaviyo’s gender prediction algorithm is great because it requires less work from both you as the business owner or email marketer and the subscriber. So you don’t effectively have to put anything in place. You don’t have to ask for additional information from your subscribers or your customers. You just kind of let it do its thing. The gender prediction algorithm uses a customer’s first name along with census data to predict whether the name is likely male, female or uncertain. So just to kind of go through, like how this happens, they use a list of first names where individuals had self identified their gender and compared those directly to verified census data. What they do is they find list loads of common names to be in line with expectations. So for example, the Name Steven was 99.6% male on the census and self identified as male 99.9% of the time. Susan, on the other hand, was female 99.8% of the time on the census and self identified 99.3% of the time. But names with uncertain genders generated larger errors between census and self identified data. And so for those names, Klaviyo errs on the side of caution and labels them as, as uncertain. So it is an option that is available to you when using Klaviyo, as Vira had mentioned, if you have the capability in the room to be a little more certain with who Klaviyo is determining as male or female, go for it. That is 100% our first recommendation. But if you don’t have the capability for that or kind of the, the time essentially or the bandwidth to do something like that, the Klaviyo gender predicted algorithm is good. It’s not bad. It’s just not going to be as relevant or as on, on point as if you were to get that information directly from the customer. And Klaviyo even says in their, in their, in the article that gender targeting isn’t foolproof because using a first name to predict someone’s gender isn’t a perfect science. So, so like in England, for example, the name Ashley is used for men and women and it’s very, very commonly used for both. Whereas here in America you wouldn’t necessarily meet a man named Ashley. They for sure exist, but it’s not as common here as it is in England. And the other thing is some people may not identify with the gender that their name traditionally implies. So maybe there is a Steven that’s on your list, but he doesn’t necessarily identify as a male. And so because of that Klaviyo prediction addiction, you’re sending out emails to him or her that are specifically for men. And then it just kind of gets complicated. You don’t want to lose customers over something that you can kind of do the work in advance to so that you can avoid any kind of situation like that. And again, it all kind of goes back to that James Black example. And I would always, always err on the side of caution when it comes to that. Send out those gender specific emails. But also making sure that you’re alluding to, if you do have offerings for the opposite gender that you’re alluding to. The fact that, hey, just because we’re sending you this email does not mean that this is what you have to buy. We have other offerings. And if that’s what you prefer, then you have options for them to change their preferences. You can make a note of it on your, on your back end and then just making, making sure that you’re making the fixes as they come along. But all in all, with all of that said segmentation based on demographic is a great way to continue sending relevant emails to the relevant audience. You are definitely not limited to location or gender. I’ve seen brands that target based on age, motherhood, stage, whether they’re pregnant or an empty nester kind of all the way in the middle. And even based on pop culture preferences, which is something that Steve from Roosevelts does. Again, if you didn’t listen to podcast episode number four, that’s the one to check out because he’s awesome, like the most lively person ever to listen to. But that is something that we, we do with them too. So then that way we’re sending out relevant emails. There was an email that I think they sent out once that was specifically for a new T shirt launch. And they sent, they sent the campaign twice to two different kind of segments. One was just the generic, like hey, I want new launches. And the other one was for people who wanted to know about this specific launch. And the one and the segment that wanted to know about that specific launch generated like, I think it was like five or ten times the return revenue. It was psychotic. I saw the numbers and I was like, what is going on? So segmentation is super, super powerful, especially if you’re basing it off of your demographic.

Vira: 50:10

So getting back to your pregnancy empty nesters example, I remember I read this book, I think it was The power of habit or something about how big companies collect the data about their customers and how they can actually predict almost what are the products that they will be buying in the future. So there was this 16 year old who was like pregnant, but she didn’t tell her parents or something and she started getting this like promotional emails. So the company basically knew that she was pregnant because she was like purchasing some, I don’t know, like a pregnancy test or something, stuff like that. So the company started sending her like promotions about hey, you are like four months pregnant or three months pregnant. Here are the supplements for you, here’s the something. And the dad was like pissed off. He was like, no, my daughter is not pregnant. Oh my gosh, why would you send it? But turned out that, I mean the company did, did a great job segmenting their customer.

Alissa: 51:04

Yeah, seriously.

Vira: 51:06

That just shows you how segmentation can really be powerful if you know your customer really well. Believe me, segmentation is the name of the game.

Alissa: 51:16

It makes or breaks honestly. And people get so impressed. When my now husband, last year, at the time, before we even got engaged, we started talking about engagement, engagement rings. And I looked one up once, those were like the only ads that I ever got. And then as soon as we posted a picture of us being engaged and I looked up, like, one picture of a wedding dress, then all I got were ads about wedding venues, wedding dresses, ect. As soon as we got married, suddenly I start getting these things about being pregnant, and I was like, what the heck is going on? Like, my Instagram, everyone is watching you. Yeah, my Instagram knows exactly the stage of life that I’m in. But it’s true. And just because we see that stuff on social media and ads that are specifically targeted doesn’t mean that we as email marketers shouldn’t be doing that as well. If anything, that should be kind of like the driver. Like, we should 100% be segmenting in that way, too, because it works. I mean, it seriously works. It’s kind of creepy sometimes, but it really works. And you’re going to be engaging with your customers forever. So it’s. It’s. Yeah, segmentation is just one of those things where it’s like, I feel like we can’t talk about it enough because people don’t get it. It’s so, so important. Like, so important. But anyways, so just to run through the three major forms of segmentation that we talked about today, the first was segmentation based on engagement. The second was segmentation based on purchasing behaviors, and the second was segmentation based on demographics. And I know if I mentioned this to Vira offline, I’m sure she will agree with me. But we’ll have to do some another episode in the future about segmentation in a more kind of advanced way just so we can provide a little more insight for you guys on how to get even better with segmenting, because, again, it is huge. And the goal is to reach that over $10 million yearly cap. So we’re going to have to get you all to 133 segments real soon.

Vira: 53:07

It’s just podcast number 12. Let’s not overwhelm people who are listening to us, because, I mean, yes, we can be talking about segmentation for, like, hours, but we’re gonna keep it for our future future podcast. If you have something to look forward to.

Alissa: 53:23

Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. All right, guys, so make sure that you don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends. If you do have any questions at all that you’d like us to feature on our podcast episodes, make sure that you send them in flowium.com/ask if you do want to get involved with an engaging and interactive community of other email marketers. Make sure to join flowium.com/community. All the resources that we use today to create the podcast can be found on our website flowium.com/podcast under each episode’s page. So I think we mentioned episode two. Make sure that you listen to it if you haven’t. Episode 4 make sure you listen listen if you haven’t and episode 11 as well. We highly recommend checking out last week’s episode page, which is episode 11, so that you can get into our holiday guide that we’ve created especially for you. Especially as the holidays are coming. So important it’s episode 11 what to Expect for Holidays 2020. When you click on that page you will get the holiday guide and we strongly recommend reviewing it because it’s going to give you a lot of insight into how to prepare for this year’s crazy holiday season. If you are new to Klaviyo or wanting to try any of the suggestions we mentioned today out for yourself, this can be a super helpful resource, this podcast, but we also offer a course where we cover everything you need to master Klaviyo and you can access that course by visiting the products page of our Flowium website. And finally, if you’re interested in getting some more advice on how to establish a solid email market marketing strategy for your e commerce store, visit flowium.com contact and sign up for a free consultation. You’ll basically talk to someone that’s like myself or Vira. We’ll be able to kind of review what you have going on right now and give you some insight into how you can improve and some opportunities for growth for you. So make sure you check it out.

Vira: 55:14

Right, right. And speaking about the improvement. So actually on our next episode we will be talking about the deliver deliverability and how to improve it. So basically we will try to explain why are your amazing emails aren’t working. Like what’s what, what can be done to make sure that your email end up in the inbox folder and not in the in the main emails folder and not in the spam folder of your customers. So this is a hot topic and we do get a lot of questions about it. So make sure to tune in. We will be talking about everything you need to know about the deliverability and I finally can pronounce this word. It’s very hard for me to pronounce it deliverability.

Alissa: 56:04

It’s hard. It’s hard. I don’t even get it right most of the time when people ask me about it I’m like deliverability.

Vira: 56:11

So come next week and we will be talking about the deliverability. Thanks for listening you guys.

Alissa: 56:20

Thank you guys. Have a great week.

Vira: 56:22

Have a great week. Bye.