A 40-year-old father of three who gets an email from a restaurant that is clearly aimed at attracting the 20-something hipster crowd.
What will he do with that email?
Chances are, it’s getting deleted. And chances also are that future emails from that restaurant will be ignored, deleted without being opened and maybe even marked as spam. Needless to say, those are all outcomes you want to avoid in email marketing.
Email segmentation can help prevent those bad outcomes and increase the odds of creating some really good ones.
What Is Email Segmentation?
Segmentation is the process of breaking your customer base into smaller groups based on certain data points. Those data points can include factors such as age, income, location, frequency of visits to your restaurant, new diners vs. regular customers – basically, however you want to break them down.
The goal is to only send emails that speak to the recipient’s demographic group.
Why go to all this trouble with email? Because email remains one of the most effective ways to attract and retain customers. And because 74 percent of consumers prefer getting business and commercial communications through email, and a whopping 91 percent of people check their email at least once per day.
Also, 66 percent of consumers have made a purchase as a result of receiving a marketing message via email.
You need to take the right approach, and segmentation is part of that.
How To Achieve Effective Email Marketing Segmentation
Segmentation is a form of “content personalization.” This simply means a way to provide customers content that is relevant to them. The goal is to provide engaging information that makes a customer want to return to your restaurant.
The Direct Marketing Association estimates that about 77 percent of all ROI from email marketing campaigns comes from segmentation.
Gathering information from your customers is the first step. For most restaurants, this will involve hiring a company that specializes in gathering data from customers and providing analytics services to brick-and-mortar companies.
You can segment customers in many ways. Some suggestions include:
The key is to gather and analyze the right kinds of information about your customers and then target your email campaign to speak directly to them. It avoids sending the wrong message to the wrong people and increases the odds of sending the right message to the right people.
That’s a smart step in building a loyal customer base for your restaurant.