How to Market Your Event with Email Audience Segmentation
When it comes to marketing your event via email, forget about one-size-fits-all solutions. In general, it’s more effective to send targeted emails to small groups than to send mass emails to every single person in your contact list.
But segmenting your audience requires a bit of strategy. Before you can tackle targeted messages, you need to understand the basics of audience segmentation. So, let’s start from the top!
What is audience segmentation?
Audience segmentation is the task of taking your master email list and dividing it into subgroups. As the folks at MailChimp explain:
The subgroups can be based on demographics such as geographic location, gender identity, age, ethnicity, income, or level of formal education. Subgroups can also be based on behavior such as purchases made in the past.
In this post, we’ll look specifically at how to use email audience segmentation for event marketing.
How should I segment my master email list?
There are endless ways you can divvy up your list, but here are a couple ideas specific to event marketing:
- By last event attended. Create lists based on how often people attend your events—i.e., create a list for people who show up to every event without fail, and another list for people who attend infrequently. You can tweak your messaging based on your audience.
- By type of event. Reach people based on their interests! For example, if you run a wine shop and you have customers that attend all of your educational workshops but never show up for comedy night, you can segment those customers into their own email list. That way, you won’t annoy your customers with irrelevant emails.
Why does audience segmentation matter?
Segmenting your audience isn’t just busywork. This extra step is worth the effort: It can lead to an uptick in conversions, which are the actions you want your audience to take, like clicking on links in your emails, registering for your events, and buying tickets.
Plus, by targeting your emails to your audience, you’ll likely see a higher open rate on your emails. Customers are more likely to open an email that seems like it was tailor-made for them than one that went out to the whole list.
In short: More personalized segmentation = more emails opens + more conversions. A win on every level.
Sounds good. How do I do it?
If you use an email marketing tool like MailChimp or Constant Contact, you can create new lists for your segmented audiences by following your service’s instructions:
- MailChimp: Getting Started with Segments
- Constant Contact: Email List Segmentation
Looking for more segmentation inspiration? check out HubSpot’s list of 30 ways to slice your email database for better segmentation.
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