In this post, I explain what email marketing segmentation is, how to segment your email database, and what best practices to follow. I also show you many examples from my personal inbox. So if you want to engage your subscribers with highly relevant, personalized messages that strengthen brand loyalty and increase ROI, keep on reading.
What is email list segmentation
Email list segmentation is the practice of dividing your subscribers into smaller, targeted groups based on specific characteristics or features. This allows you to create and send highly relevant messages that generate significantly more engagement than generic emails.
Common characteristics used in digital marketing to segment email lists include gender, location, age, occupation, purchase history, engagement level, etc. For a complete list, click here.
Compare these two emails:
The email from Semrush, an SEO marketing platform, is an example of a broadcast email typically sent to all or nearly all email subscribers.
In contrast, the email from H&M is an example of a targeted email, sent exclusively to a specific audience segment — registered members only.
Email list segmentation examples
There are many approaches marketers use to segment emails. In retail, businesses send different emails that nudge customers to go back to their website, view more products, or reopen their abandoned shopping cart.
Mobile apps and SaaS companies segment users based on their usage of the product and its features. For instance, Strava, a fitness app, sends welcome emails to new users after they sign up, along with additional emails that help them in onboarding and maximizing their experience with the app.
Among the most effective targeted emails are ones that offer bonuses, coupons, special deals, or discounts to loyal customers or clients who make frequent purchases.
Why should you segment your email marketing contact list?
- Engaged subscribers. When you have segmented lists, tailored content that’s actually relevant, and added inspiring call-to-actions, you’re taking people, who have shown some interest in your business (“warm” prospects), and making them even more engaged using personalized content.
- Satisfied customers. Tailored email content that directly addresses clients’ desires or problems helps them fulfill their needs and achieve their goals.
- Lower unsubscribe rate. When customers see their name in an email subject line or when they get educational materials, tools, or goods they were looking for, they are incentivised to click and discover more rather than unsubscribe, unless you bombard your subscribers with highly personalized emails too often, which can give them a feeling that you’re stalking them.
- Better conversions. Relevant emails, product recommendations, and personal offers capture more attention and drive higher conversion rates than generic messages, which often miss the mark.
- Higher deliverability. A lower unsubscribe rate and high engagement (open and click-through rate) with your emails positively impacts your sender’s reputation and deliverability rate.
- Better campaign results. Higher email open rates, more clicks, and better engagement—all help improve your overall email performance. And by tracking what works best for each segment, you can fine-tune your future campaigns for even better outcomes.
How to segment your email list
Any email list can be segmented in a few straightforward steps, either manually or automatically. To do this effectively, it’s important to have clear objectives for your email campaign, as these will guide you in dividing your audience and tailoring messages for specific results. So the first step should be:
Define your email campaign goals and metrics
Begin by clearly defining your goals and the metrics you’ll use to evaluate whether you’ve achieved them. Goals like “I want to improve engagement,” or “I want to reduce unsubscribe rates” are too vague. They have to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
For example, imagine you have an e-commerce business and you want to increase conversions. Now let’s make this goal SMART:
The metrics that can help you track your results include:
- conversion rate,
- click-through rate (CTR),
- average order value (AOV) in November to measure the impact of upsell offers.
Gather necessary data
I assume you have begun collecting data through your subscription forms, such as names, email addresses, or even location of your subscribers. This basic data is typically easy for people to share and allows for simple segmentation.
To gather more data, you need to solve two main challenges associated with data collection these days:
Problem 1 – Trust
After so many data breaches, customers are more cautious than ever about sharing personal information. To gain their trust, it’s essential to build transparent relationships and be honest about why you need certain data and how you intend to use it.
Solution
Begin with a clear privacy policy that outlines how the data will be used. Ensure that you only ask for the necessary information to avoid overwhelming your subscribers.
Problem 2 – Data privacy regulations
With regulations like GDPR (EU), CAN-SPAM (US), CASL (Canada), and PDPA (Singapore, Malaysia), and other international privacy laws, you must ensure that your data collection and email marketing activities are legally compliant. This can limit the kind of information you can collect and how you handle it.
Solution
Learn about the laws that are applicable in your region and your subscribers’ regions and consider how you will manage them.
Once you have these two points figured out, you can ask your subscribers for more information.
Also, over time, their interactions with your landing page / website / app and emails will grow and give you valuable behavioral data.
This data will help you create even more segments — such as identifying those who have opened your last five emails, or those who consistently click on certain types of offers or products.
Segment your list
Let me show you how to manually segment a small email list in Google Sheets, so you get the idea.
Take a look at my email list that I created with ChatGPT (it would have taken me ages to come up with so many fake names and emails). My table also has columns for Location, Age, and Latest purchase.
Now, let’s filter the email addresses by the sum of the last purchase. I’m looking for people who spent under $100 in October. All I need to do is add a filter to the corresponding column and select “< $100” to display only those entries.
The same process happens when you use software but with more advanced filtering. For example, you can create a segment of subscribers who have clicked on any promotional link in your last few campaigns, interacted with specific product categories, or abandoned their shopping carts.
To achieve the goal of my imaginatory targeted email campaign — increase conversions by 15% in November, I will also need data on the exact purchased item and similar or complementing items I can offer to upsell to each person. Doing it manually for a segmented email list of 21 people is possible, however, in the future (when my theoretical business flourishes), I would rather use automation.
Email segmentation tools make it easy to create segments by automatically tracking customer interactions, purchase history, and engagement. These tools enable you to build dynamic segments that automatically update as customer behavior changes. You can read more about them in this section.
Email list segmentation strategies
You can use any trackable feature to segment your email list. Here are the most common segmentation ideas and examples of how businesses use them.
Demographic segmentation
- Age;
- Income level;
- Education;
- Gender;
- Geographic location, timezone, season, weather;
- Occupation, job title;
- Organization type (in case you work with businesses).
This is the minimal set of information every business tries to find out about customers to build initial buyer personas.
For instance, retailers collect customers’ locations to recommend season-specific products or promote regional offers.
While B2B companies want to know subscribers’ job titles or organization types they work in to craft the right messages that speak to their role or business needs.
Behavioral segmentation
- Purchase history and patterns — what, when, and how often customers make purchases;
- Sales or marketing funnel stage — where customers are in the customer journey;
- Considered products — what customers are thinking about buying or have viewed;
- Abandoned shopping cart — what items customers left in their shopping cart;
- Shopping preferences — whether customers prefer physical stores or online shopping;
- Preferred technology — what devices and software your customers use.
- Email preferences and interaction — how frequently subscribers prefer to receive emails, how often they open them, what types of emails they engage with, which links they click on;
- Customer motivations — why customers make purchases (price sensitivity, seeking convenience, discounts, preference for eco-friendly products, or particular events like the school season or holidays).
E-commerce and subscription services make extensive use of behavioral data. They engage customers with product recommendations, cart abandonment reminders, and exclusive deals and discounts that encourage repeat visits.
Interest-based segmentation
- Subscription source and timing—when and how new subscribers join your list (e.g., through a website signup, event registration, or lead magnet);
- Survey responses—what customers care about, what their concerns, needs, and preferences are.
Long-sales-cycle companies, SaaS businesses, and some service-based businesses may collect information about clients’ interests to understand the initial intent behind sign-ups as well as each customer’s stage in the sales funnel.
For instance, a person who subscribed via a lead magnet is likely seeking in-depth information about solving a problem. This is the awareness stage, where companies can nurture leads by sending them more useful and relevant content about the product or their problem. By leveraging knowledge base software, businesses can create tailored resources and FAQs, helping segmented email lists access answers quickly and boosting engagement.
On the other hand, a subscriber you gained from a promotional offer may already be comparing prices on goods or services. This is the interest stage, where businesses can close a deal by offering a discount, inviting them to a product demo, or providing additional incentives.
As for survey or sign-up form responses, they let businesses directly understand their audience’s concerns, preferences, or challenges.
Engagement segmentation
- Membership or subscription type—what type of membership or subscription a person has.
- Event attendance—what offline gathering or webinar customers participated in, if it’s their first attendance, etc.
Businesses that offer tiered services collect engagement data to encourage customers to keep paying or upgrade to a higher tier.
Companies that regularly host events can use data on event attendees to send targeted follow-ups, promote similar future events, or provide relevant resources based on attendance history.
What data should you collect? This depends on your marketing needs and goals. If you think something is important and can be used in your targeted campaign, go for it. Just don’t get lost down a rabbit hole right away. It’s better to focus on the basics and check the industry best practices I’ve prepared for you.
Email list segmentation best practices
Before you dive into segmentation, it’s important to get the basics right — starting with a clean email list. Good list hygiene increases your sender’s reputation, improves email deliverability, and helps you comply with regulations. Read more in our email list cleaning guide.
Once your list is in good shape, it’s time to focus on segmentation. Here are the best practices for effective email segmentation:
- Start small and scale. Don’t overwhelm yourself by creating too many segments at once. Begin with 2-3 key lists, send targeted campaigns, analyze the results, and only then expand as you learn more about your audience’s behavior.
- Focus on relevant data. All data seems important but it’s not always helpful to collect everything. Only gather the data that is necessary for your segmentation goals.
- Tailor the content. Go beyond simple personalization of a subject line. Give users the information they need—relevant product recommendations, exclusive offers, or valuable insights based on their past interactions and preferences.
- Test and learn. Experimentation is key. Some campaigns will perform well, some will fail, but each experience provides insights. The more you learn, the easier it is to predict the outcome. When learning on smaller groups (A/B testing), mistakes are not as painful. So use this marketing strategy and always experiment with your content, timing, and frequency to know exactly what your target audience likes.
- Revise the segmentation. New customers turn to loyal ones, while loyal ones might churn from you. An updated segmented email list helps you achieve the goals of your targeted campaign.
- Ask about preferences. It’s easier to segment subscribers if they tell you about their interests directly. When someone subscribes, ask them to indicate their email preferences, frequency, and types of content they wish to receive from you. Keep the form short, respect their time, and always thank them for their effort.
Email list segmentation software
There are two types of software that can do the job: CRMs and email-sending platforms. CRMs excel at managing detailed customer information and segmenting based on deeper insights. Email-sending platforms focus primarily on delivering, automating, and optimizing your campaigns.
Here’s a look at the top tools in each category:
CRMs to automatically segment your email lists
- HubSpot. HubSpot offers a complete set of tools to manage contacts, segment your audience, and automate email marketing campaigns. The criteria you can use to segment your email list include customer lifecycle stage, website interactions, specific user behaviors, etc.
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The platform pulls data from customer interactions across different touchpoints, like email engagement, social media interactions, web behavior, and purchase history. The solution would be ideal for complex, large-scale businesses looking to deeply integrate their sales and email marketing efforts through highly detailed segments.
- Zoho CRM. Zoho helps businesses segment contacts based on sales funnel stages, interactions, and lead scores. It’s a user-friendly tool to manage email lists and customer data.
Email-sending platforms with email segmentation capabilities
- Mailchimp. The platform is known for its ease of use and wide marketing automation capabilities for email segmentation. It allows marketers to segment subscribers based on demographics, engagement levels, and purchase history.
- GetResponse. This is a versatile platform for both small businesses and enterprises, GetResponse offers segmentation based on demographics, behavior, and engagement data. It also includes email automation features like event-triggered messages and dynamic segments.
- Omnisend. Focused on e-commerce businesses, Omnisend allows segmentation based on shopping behavior, product preferences, and engagement data. It also offers customizable automation workflows to send personalized, targeted messages at key points in the customer journey.
- ActiveCampaign. With ActiveCampaign, you can target contacts based on behavior, previous campaign interactions, site activity, and past purchases. The platform offers merge tags and dynamic content to better personalize and tailor emails for each audience segment.
- Klaviyo. This is a reasonable choice for e-commerce businesses looking for seamless integration with platforms like Shopify. It allows you to segment your email address database based on browsing behavior, purchase history, and engagement metrics.
What’s next?
After segmenting your email list, it’s essential to make sure that your carefully crafted emails actually reach your subscribers. To do this, you’ll need a reliable email-sending solution that guarantees great deliverability and helps you avoid spam traps and blacklists.
To explore the best options, check out our detailed guide on email deliverability tools, where we compare the features, prices, pros, and cons of each option.