MailNinja’s segmentation strategy

by | Fri 1 Mar, 19

As part of my role at MailNinja, I have taken the member score from Mailchimp and built it up further as a way to target the most engaged members within a list. The most effective way of doing this is with a Mailchimp Pro account as this allows for more granularity when building segments.

From this segmentation, it is possible to pinpoint the most engaged contacts within a list and therefore highlight your most valuable audience members. You can also segment all the way through to those contacts that could be doing your sender reputation damage by being deleted without being opened or worse, already going straight into a spam folder.

Mailchimp’s member categorisation:

1-star – unsubscribed and resubscribed or have bounced in the past and don’t engage
2-star – Either new or no engagement
3-star – Either relatively new on the list or not fully engaging
4-star – regularly opens and/or click campaigns
5-star – Consistently opens/clicks on e-mail

Building on this, is MailNinja’s new categorisation:

BLACK – Current subscriber – 1 Star has been emailed
GREY – Current subscriber – 2 Stars and hasn’t opened and was created over 3 months ago
GREEN – 2-star subscribers created less than 3 months ago or 2-star subscribers that have opened an email in the last 3 months
BRONZE – Current subscriber – 3 Stars and has opened any emails but not clicked
ORANGE – Current subscriber – 3 Stars and has opened an email and clicked through on any of them.
SILVER – Current subscriber – 4 Stars and has opened any emails but not clicked
RED – Current subscriber – 4 Stars and has opened an email and clicked through on any of them.
GOLD – Current subscriber – 5 Stars and has opened any emails but not clicked
PURPLE – AMBASSADOR – Current subscriber – 5 Stars and has opened an email and clicked through on any of them.

With these segments, it’s advisable to split them further into customers and subscribers only so that the right message can be sent to the right group. If there is an e-commerce system tied to Mailchimp this will be easier. Beyond this, the possibilities are almost endless. Tagging users that regularly use specific devices to open their emails great for tailoring content that works specifically on one type of platform and not others (think embedded and background videos), gender for adapting tone and products – these are just a few areas that could help with better personalisation and targeting. Combine this with a birthday or key event (for instance, the first time that your customer purchased from you) really narrows down the scope of the send and makes sure the message will a) get through and b) be read.

When looking to reduce customer lists and remove non-engagers, it is better to unsubscribe so that the contacts history is still present, and they can’t accidentally be re-added when a manual upload is done.

Below is a schedule of suggested actions for both subscribers and customers, for targeting, messaging and actions to be taken for each group.

Mailninja engagement segmentation (explainer)

 

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