The average human has an attention span of about eight seconds. When it comes to emails though, it often feels like that attention span shrinks. The key to email marketing for contractors, therefore, is making the most of that short span of time—and keeping your emails out of spam folders.

Email segmentation helps you use those few seconds to open a door for both you and your customers. How? It does this by helping you connect with quality leads and personalize your messages, all while keeping your customers fully engaged. And it does so with data that you already have on hand.

What is Email Segmentation?

The first step to making the most of your email marketing strategy is to learn what exactly email segmentation is. Email segmentation refers to how you break up your emails into different groups and then break up those groups into sub-groups, and so on.

The goal of email segmentation is threefold: helping to engage customers, allowing you to easily personalize your email messages, and optimizing your email content to meet your customers where they are in their buyer journey. In short, it helps you to more accurately target what to send in your email, when to send it, and who to send it to.

Segmentation Strategies

There are two key strategies for email segmentation that you can incorporate into your marketing approach. Remember how we said you can utilize data you already have on hand to employ segmentation? This is where that data comes in handy. The two strategies you should know about are:

Strategy 1: Membership Status

This will involve the people who are signed up as a part of any membership programs you have such as your maintenance plan. As you can imagine, you aren’t going to send the same email content to someone who is a part of your maintenance program and one who isn’t, even if they are both meant to remind the recipient to schedule their yearly heater maintenance appointment.

Following this example, you can use email segmentation to personalize your content to your membership holders with content that serves as a simple reminder. Likewise, you can send an email to your non-membership clientele encouraging them to 1) schedule their maintenance and 2) consider a maintenance program as it will save them some cash.

Strategy 2: Recency, Frequency, Monetary

This second strategy requires a bit more data, but it allows for much more precise segmentation. As you may have already guessed, this second category is focused on breaking down your emails based on how recently a customer has purchased a product or service, how often they purchase and how much they spend.

One example of this strategy would be finding those customers who purchase annual services but may not have done so in the past year and sending them a reminder email that results in their scheduling maintenance or repairs. Another example would be sending an email to a long-time customer whose AC you installed over 10 years ago an informational email that prompts them to schedule a system replacement.

Get Started Today

As you can see, segmentation allows you a better grasp of the content your clients are most likely to engage with and respond to. Like we said before, this means you have a better chance of capturing your customers’ attention, engaging them more thoroughly, and meeting them exactly where they are on their customer journey, whether they are only being introduced to your company or they are a long time customer.

You may be wondering how exactly you need to get started:

• First, determine what challenges you're facing as a business and how email marketing could help you. (Ex: Maybe you noticed that your Maintenance Program membership shrunk this year)
• Second, collect data and store it in your CRM database. (Ex: Start flagging Maintenance Program members and the date they joined/the date their membership expires)
• Lastly, break down your data into groups and sub-groups. (Ex: Pull a group of Maintenance Program members who did not renew their membership last year)

The sooner you start collecting your data the sooner you can optimize your email marketing strategy. We can help! With our marketing prowess, we will work with you to create an email marketing plan that meets the goals you have for your business. All you have to do is reach out.

Contact iMarket Solutions today to give your email marketing strategy the boost you need. We are dedicated to contractor success.