Building your first segment

In this article, you learn how to make simple segments and complex segments. We describe a fictive case of a toy shop in further detail. Additionally, we provide some tips and best practices.

Before you get started

• The Flexmail segmentation is available for all subscription plans, so you do not need to take limitations into account.
• For building really powerful segments, you need data. If you want to reach a specific target group, think about the data you need to be able to recognise this target group in your account. More tips about this are provided in this blog article.
• With the Flexmail segmentation, you can combine up to five conditions per segment.
• With nested segments, you can also continue to build on the selection in a segment already existing, so that you can make a mutual relationship visible or save yourself some work. You can nest segments up to five levels deep.
• Segmenting is only possible on active contacts.
• You can also use segments to exclude contacts from a specific campaign. For this purpose, bring these specific contacts together in a segment.

Our fictive case: toy shop The Little Elephant

Step 1: Start with your objects

If you use email marketing for your business, you want to get some return from your investment. Let us start with the objects.

Our toy shop starts, and we want to use email marketing to do the following:

• Get our customers to the toy shop and website more often;
• Guide interested people to a first purchase;
• As a small player, build a loyal customer database with extra value in comparison with big players.

Step 2: Draw up a strategy on the basis of these objects

Recording objects has an additional consequence. On the basis of your objects, you can start to build a strategy. How will we use communication to realise the objects above?

• Motivating curious visitors to the website to subscribe to our communication
  • Putting an opt-in form on the website that rouses interest;
  • Starting to build a relationship with a great welcome email with promotion;
  • Having them choose what types of emails they want to receive.
• Getting more visits from customers
  • Sending interesting content
    • Establishing what is interesting/relevant
    • Building content on the basis of interests
  • Informing people of new products
• Building a loyal customer database
  • Being there when there are relevant moments or when people want to make purchases
    • Pregnancy;
    • Holidays (St Nicholas, Christmas);
    • Birthday present;
    • Topics related to sustainability.

Step 3: Which data do you need to identify these target groups?

Which target groups and data do we have (or need) for our strategy?

Segment: Subscriptions website

Segmentation on the basis of used opt-in form

For curious visitors it is simple. We put an opt-in form on the website. People who complete this form can end up in a specific target group.

By putting these subscribers into a separate segment, you can send them the welcome email with a nice promotion immediately after registration.

Segment: Customers

Segmentation on field ‘Type Contact’ has to equal ‘Customer’ .

We can also import existing customers (manually or automatically). To this end, we have to create our own field. Let us name this field ‘Type contact’.

Segments based on interests

To ensure that we will send relevant emails, we will work with interests.

For The Little Elephant, we create the following interests:

• Newsletter
• Promotions
• New products
• Health tips
• Highlight: Sustainable toys

For each of these interests, we also create a related segment:

• Segment: Newsletter
• Segment: Promotions
• Segment: New products
• Segment: Health tips
• Segment: Sustainability

These interests can be useful for both existing customers and interested people. We can subscribe contacts to these interests using the settings of our opt-in form, based on their clicks in our emails or by using automations . They can also do this themselves via their profile, of course.

Create a segment based on date of birth

Using a form, you can also ask for the date of birth. Your contacts receive a nice action or promotion on their birthday as a reward.

To this end, you need a ‘Date of birth’ field.

Segment based on pregnancy

If you have a specific offer for newborns or if are drawing up lists of births, you might want to set up specific segments for this. People expecting a baby need many things, and they would be happy with you as a reliable partner.

This, too, can be included in the specific interest ‘List of births and pregnancy tips’.

Segmentation on the basis of brands

You can also look at the click behaviour in newsletters to get some idea of the child’s age category or fields of interests. With this information, you can make your content a lot more relevant. Using private interests for this is another possibility.