Five Tiers of Email Subscribers

You don't segment email campaigns to better target customers ... there are models / equations / AI to do all of that and do it really well.

You segment email campaigns to understand what is happening.

Segmentation doesn't have to be complicated. Here are five tiers / segments. If a customer doesn't meet the criteria for (1), you move down to (2) etc.

1. 1+ Email Purchase in the Past Year.
2. 1+ Email Click-Through in the Past Year.
3. 1+ Email Open in the Past Year.
4. 1+ Purchase in the Past Year, Not via Email Marketing.
5. All Other Email Subscribers.

For each campaign, you measure performance by each of the five tiers of email subscribers. Tiers (1) and (2) will generate the vast majority of sales caused by email marketing. Tier (5) is the place where you execute your experiments, because these people are unlikely to open/click so you can try different ideas to see what might work ... if something works, move it up to Tier (4), if it works there, keep moving it up the ladder. Tier (3) is also a great place to experiment with new ideas.

Clients with very good email marketing programs generate +/- 25% of annual ecommerce sales from email marketing. If you aren't there yet, segment customers as outlined above, experiment, and measure results.