Over the past few years, HubSpot has upped its game to become one of the most streamlined and powerful email marketing tools available on the market – outpacing, in our opinion, former market leaders such as MailChimp. In a previous article, we looked at how HubSpot’s automation tools can help you increase your returns from email marketing.
Today, we would like to explain how segmentation works in HubSpot, and how segmentation can help improve engagement and relevancy for your marketing emails.
What Does Segmentation Mean In Email Marketing?
In email marketing, ‘segmentation’ involves dividing an email subscriber list into smaller and more targeted segments based on user-defined criteria, e.g. location, previous purchases, known interests, buyer stage, and so on. Segmenting your lists is a way of tailoring your email content and promotions to suit the needs and preferences of each segment, making it easier for you to personalise your customer communications, and also making it easier to manage large contact lists.
In traditional email marketing platforms, while you may have access to basic segmentation tools, you normally had to create your segments manually, downloading contact lists from your CRM and uploading them into your email platform as a CSV spreadsheet. Needless to say, this can be a messy process and is prone to error and needs constant manual updating.
HubSpot takes segmentation to the next level by not only providing a wider range of segmentation options and features, but also integrating your email marketing platform with your CRM, so that the whole process is seamless.
How Does Email Segmentation Work In HubSpot?
Let’s say that this is your first email campaign on HubSpot. To get started with a segmented list you simply go to your contacts section and click on lists. From here, you can create custom lists based on user behaviour, demographics, time zone, engagement level, or any other relevant data point stored in your HubSpot CRM – just like you would with traditional email marketing, but in half the time.
HubSpot also lets you align your email segments with your buyer personas, or ideal customer profiles. (Start building your buyer personas, if you haven’t already, using HubSpot’s make my persona tool.) If you like, you can set up a ‘master list’ for each of your buyer personas, because sometimes you’ll want to email the whole list.
However, often you’ll only want email a certain segment of each buyer persona, and this is where HubSpot’s email segmentation tools become really powerful.
Email Segmentation And Lead Nurturing
HubSpot’s email segmentation tools weren’t designed simply to make your life more convenient and easier (although they do that, with interest). They were designed to help you nurture leads and make more sales.
For example, email segmentation lets you differentiate between buyer persona contacts who are active customers, against those who are prospective customers, and also those who are lapsed customers. In this way, you can tailor your email content not just for buyer personas but for their specific buyer stage and relationship with your business.
HubSpot is a great email marketing platform because it helps you to organise and keep track of these multilevel segments and lists in a way that doesn’t get confusing, and that ensures that no lead goes cold by falling through the gaps. For business owners that had to manage email marketing using spreadsheets ‘back in the day’, HubSpot is little short of a revelation. By breaking down your target audiences into small niche segments, it’s easier for you to personalise communication, tailor your messages in response to real-time engagement, encourage sales decisions, and develop individual, one-to-one relationships with your prospects and customers.
This is the power of segmentation in HubSpot email marketing, and it’s little short of poetry.
To find out more about HubSpot or email marketing and how you can use these amazing tools to make sales and grow your business, please contact one of our specialists today by clicking here.
