Segmentation
(discover the importance of segmentation for your online marketing strategy)

SEGMENTATION

Segmentation is one of the best marketing practices because to grow a business, the most important thing of all is to know your customer. And we are not just talking about the ideal customer (the so-called 'avatar'), but about your real potential customers, i.e. all those people you have come into contact with or who have even ended up buying, rightfully becoming part of your business and who will help you grow your project.
Without these potential and real customers your business cannot exist and, again, without them, you cannot grow. Knowing your customers is necessary to make effective strategic decisions; however, it is not enough to know who they are. You have to know their behaviour, their buying habits, their characteristics and their buying potential, among other things. You have to know everything about them. And then you have to group them into segments to facilitate the creation of effective, well-targeted strategies. Clearly, the more detailed and specific the segment you create, the easier it will be to know what kind of message and promotions to send them and what kind of response to expect. But we must be realistic and we cannot create infinite segments, because otherwise it would be impossible to act efficiently.

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So, with these clear premises, let's look at how to correctly segment the people who come into contact with our business, bearing in mind that everyone will know their real potential customers best, so these are more like guidelines to follow, which are normally applied across the board:

segment people based on the type of interaction they have with you: this is the simplest and most direct way to segment, based on a person's reaction after their first interaction with you (with the first message or email you send) and create as many consistent flows as you can to follow the type of interaction and take them where you want them. It's about creating a story, where for every interaction there is an action on your part (a second email or message) and so on until you bring all these categories of people towards your goal.
segmenting through social networks: each platform (Facebook, Linkedin, etc.) has its own way of segmenting (by age, interest, location, work, gender...), so take advantage of these automated tools to differentiate your strategy and the way you connect with those people.

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segment by focusing on the creative and not the copy: when communicating with a platform user, it is very likely that the platform itself will act as an initial segmentation factor (think of age and the huge difference between a Facebook user and a Tik Tok user for example). So create a video or image that captures the attention of the target audience you need and don't worry too much about the copy, as this will come at a later stage, when you already have an initial interaction or segmentation.

Before we delve into this topic, let's look at a piece of information that alone can justify the entire segmentation process: according to Mailchimp, email campaigns that use efficient targeting have up to a 15% higher open rate, which translates into 15% more people reading your emails and potentially completing a purchase.

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In any case, perhaps the most important segmentation you can do is between people who are already your customers and people who are not yet your customers; the reason is that a person who is already your customer can become a regular customer, and a regular customer is worth up to 50 times a person who has not yet bought. This number may seem exaggerated, but it is not: we already know that it costs 10 times less to keep a customer than to acquire a new potential customer (this is the first thing that is studied in economics and marketing demonstrated through data); if you add to this the possibility that this customer becomes a regular customer, coming to buy at least 5 times, you have already done your maths. And be careful: because 5 times, depending on the type of market, is not even close to the number of purchases of a regular customer (so it could be much higher).
So it is important to differentiate almost every email you send (as well as paid advertisements and other communications you have with your audience) between those intended for customers and those intended for people who have not yet purchased.

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In almost all our email marketing flows we follow this principle and propose different copy for more efficient results. And the same principle applies to all stages of the sales funnel, because the way you communicate with someone you have just met cannot and should not be the same as the way you communicate with someone who has already seen your products, who has already added them to their shopping cart, who has already started the checkout, who has already completed a purchase or/and who has already purchased several times.

A simple example that you can try once you have 300-400 contacts registered in your email lists and once you have implemented automatic email flows is as follows:
create a segment of people who have placed at least one order in your online shop (below I leave you the rules on how to create this segment in Klaviyo so that you always have it at hand). This same segment can be used on many occasions to differentiate your emails as explained above, but for this specific case you could send an email to all your contacts EXCEPT those in the segment of people who have placed at least one order in your online shop, and send them a normal email (such as a new product, or the TOP 3 of the previous month...

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in short, any normal campaign without a discount) and tell them that exceptionally, you have extended their welcome discount code until Sunday (depending on the day you send it of course). It is clear that if they have not purchased even once, they will certainly not have used the discount code either, but it is also true that if you have them on your list, they will have subscribed to your newsletter. So in this very simple way, you will give all those who have not yet done so the chance to buy with a discount. 
Of course, if for some reason the message reaches someone who has already used the code, you can always tell them that if something goes wrong and the code doesn't work, just contact you and you will give them more codes. And that way you won't lose the sale.

Another equally easy example that you can always try once you already have about 300-400 registered contacts is segmentation by birthday date (clearly this is an example that you should not use on dates close to those you used for the first example above, because if you did, you would lose most of the benefit for you):

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It is the simplest thing in the world, but consider one thing: we are not going to ask for the person's date of birth at the subscription stage, because it often generates resistance, so if we do not have a brand that is a leader in the sector, it is better to avoid this type of segmentation at such an early stage (better to have a person subscribe without a date than to have fewer people subscribe but with a date of birth). 
With this very clear reasoning, we can think about how to use it in an alternative way, to create an email that achieves two results at the same time: to increase the authority of your email and to increase orders in a certain period. Simply create an email in which we ask our subscribers when their birthday is, telling them that we will create a discount code associated with this date just for them. In this way, the first thing we will achieve is that many people will reply to the e-mail indicating their date of birth (and the more replies we receive, the more authority our e-mail will have vis-à-vis Google). In addition, for each reply we receive, we will have to create a discount code that we will send back to our subscribers, and what might happen should be this some will tell you their real date of birth, so they can use the code on the real date (which is fine, because you are most likely securing an order on that date); others (the smarter ones) will tell you a date very close to the one on which you send the first email, because they hope to take advantage of the situation and use the discount code to their advantage at that time (which is even better, because all you care about is that they place the order, and if it is now, even better). In addition to these two advantages that we have just described, we must also take into account that the fact that we can get in touch with our customers/potential customers in such a personal way will give us the opportunity to create an even closer relationship with them, so it will also improve the engagement of our audience (or at least those who will want to respond to that email).