Email Segmentation Best Practices

The best way to immediately elevate your email-based sales and marketing strategy is by segmenting your email sequences. Segmenting is the practice of separating your email sequences to target specific audiences, like CEOs or people working in a particular industry.

Effective email segmentation allows you to send out customized messaging at scale. However, it’s important to set yourself up for success in segmentation: first, identify how you want to segment your audience. Then, segment the leads you have while maintaining pristine data hygiene. Only when you’ve prepared with those steps can you continue by creating your segmented email sequences.

Identify Your Audiences

Who are your customers? Before you can segment your next customers into groups, you need to know who you’ve already succeeded at selling to. Talking to your sales and marketing teams should give you a broad overview of who they’ve seen success with.

This is a critical stage of the process; if you get off on the wrong foot, the rest of your audience segmentation will be poorly targeted. Careful, detailed conversations with your leading salespeople will reveal not only who they’re selling to, but how they differentiate their successful pitches between different customers.

Part of that careful examination should be differentiating between your inbound and outbound personas. While an inbound engineer at the individual contributor level can be a helpful advocate from within your prospect’s organization, you should make sure your outbound efforts are selling to CXOs as well.

Instead, you should identify who your outbound prospects will be and the categories along which you’ll segment them. Once you’ve identified how you’ll segment your audience, you can start the process of doing it with your existing leads.

Best Practices for Lead Segmentation

Once you know your segments, you should apply that segmentation to the pool of leads that is already inside your CRM. In order to do that well, you’ll need clean data, and most companies struggle with data hygiene.

That means sorting all of your leads into categories–for example, industries–and then combing through each category, one at a time. Once a particular industry has clean data, your sales and marketing teams can start reaching out to those leads and your operations team can move on to cleaning the next dataset.
If your teams aren’t equipped to handle that significant undertaking as quickly as your sales teams need, that’s alright. It’s one of Salaria’s specialties–we’ll clean your data, sort leads into appropriate segments, and even reach out to them directly if you need.

Launching Segmented Email Campaigns

When you’ve identified your market segments and sorted your existing leads into those segments with clean data, you’re ready to launch your segmented email campaigns. Of course, it’s important to make sure you’re following cold email best practices with these campaigns as well.

You should also make sure that you have sales collateral that’s segmented along the same lines. Reach out to each segment of leads with specific answers to the issues and objections that are common with their persona, and your personalized campaigns will see much higher response rates.

Have any questions about segmenting campaigns or any other part of the sales funnel? Feel free to reach out with us for a quick chat today!