Avoiding One Size Fits All for Email

Photo Credit: The Sophisticated Eric Odiin

Email should be every brand’s highest performing channel but often brands struggle with how they can extract value without overwhelming their subscribers. In this post I’ll show you how to design email segment strategies that will perform well without overloading and alienating your audience.

Why Did They Subscribe?

This is the fundamental question that will drive your email marketing flow. Most sites have three sign up points, newsletter, promo and checkout and often they make the mistake of assuming consumers on all three lists want the same outcomes.

Newsletter / Signaling Signups – These customers aren’t ready to buy but want to be kept in the loop so that later on when conditions are more favorable, they may turn from subscriber to buyer

Email for Promo Code Signups – These signups are often the most fickle because the motivation for signing up is strictly a financial incentive for the end user

Checkout Opt-In – Web consumers at this point implicitly expect that they’ll be added to a marketing email list after they purchase and in our experience, even when checkout funnels have clear opt outs, if a brand has a strong enough value proposition people will often consent.

The first mistake outside of a basic post order flow is that many companies send the same exact emails to each list instead of meeting consumers where they are and designing campaigns around them.

What Do They Want in the Relationship?

Referring back to these core groups, we need to understand what they would be looking to get out of subscribing and staying engaged.

Newsletter signups will definitely need nurturing in addition to product announcements, use cases and upgrades to feel confident they are making the right decision when they’re ready to buy

Promo code subscribers will likely respond well to offers, closeouts and deals and aren’t going to want to click on emails detailing minor edits and holiday announcements.

Checkout opt-in subscribers will want post purchase nurturing of how-to guides, enhancements and with the right mix of both can easily be upsold both for deals/promo and new releases.

Flow Design

Each intent should have it’s own flow with very few emails being sent to subscribers on all three lists.

Pre-Purchase Subscribers

• Nurture Flows
• Use Cases
• News/Enhancements/Launches

Enhancements / Launches

• Promo Subscribers
• Deals and discounts
• Value Add

Checkout Subscribers

• Next Steps
• Use Cases
• Pertinent Updates
• Enhancements/Launches

This is just a 101 level article. For ways to really dive deep into email, follow this space.