Your customer base is made up of individuals with different needs.

At You wouldn’t feed a kid at a restaurant caviar, just like you wouldn’t feed an adult at a restaurant chicken nuggets. Adults and children have different preferences, so it simply wouldn’t make sense to serve them the same type of dish.

This logic applies to email marketing, too. If you serve all of your customers with the same messaging, chances are that you’re going to miss out on an opportunity to engage with most of them. More definitively, when you use a “one-size-fits-all” approach to email you risk getting flagged as spam, triggering unsubscribes, and increasing your bounce rate.

The best email campaigns are as precise and timely as possible. All it takes is one irrelevant email to lose a connection with someone on your email list. So how can marketers target different types of subscribers with personalized emails to better serve groups within their audience?

The answer is segmentation.

What Is Segmentation?

Email segmentation is a technique marketers use to divide subscribers into smaller groups (or “segments”) that are targeted with email campaigns tailored to their specific interests and/or behaviors. The idea is that sending segmented emails allows marketers to reach their audiences with messaging that actually matters to them.

There are a number of benefits to segmenting your emails, including increased conversion, open, and click-through rates coupled with decreased unsubscribe rates. Just take a look at the data: