Segmentation and Personalization in Email Marketing: How to Tailor Your Messages to Your Audience

Email Marketing is a necessary marketing channel needed for engaging and nurturing existing and potential customers in the fintech industry. However, this channel can be difficult to approach strategically in order to have a successful email marketing campaign and recruit potential leads and clients to one’s fintech product or financial service. Potential customers are not created equally, and sending them similar messages or emails can be a recipe for disaster. Customers require emails to have differentiation and personalization to stand out from the hundreds of marketing sales emails flooding their inboxes every week.

Thankfully this problem has a solution. Customer segmentation can be a powerful technique and tool that can allow fintechs to divide their email list of potential leads into smaller personalized groups based on their common characteristics and interests. These factors can include personal demographics, customer behavior, and purchasing preferences and history. By utilizing customer segmentation, fintechs can tailor their email marketing messages to each individual group, creating more relevant and effective content for each segment. This can lead to a high engagement and conversion rate while improving overall customer satisfaction by a noticeable margin.

Creating an Effective Segmentation System

Fintechs can double down on email marketing segmentation using the following four steps:

1. Set Goals
   Fintech email strategies often include multiple campaigns with different objectives and narratives. Onboarding new users, collecting feedback, and promoting new products and services all have different email marketing strategies and campaigns behind them. Separating these and coming up with separate goals for each of them is a good start when identifying goals for these strategies and campaigns.At its core, segmentation is all about converting users through relatable and relevant email marketing content. From a fintech perspective, one’s goal should focus on defining the exact narrative and conversation a company wants based off of their product or service. These may include:
   • Increase the sales of a specific product or service?
   • Drive more fintech app downloads?
   • Get more fintech users to upgrade to another tier of service?
   • Register more fintech users for an event?

   Defining clear goals for an email marketing campaign determines the type of data points one would need to assess the success of the email marketing strategy.

2. Identify Relevant Data Points
   Once the goals of a fintech’s email marketing strategy have been laid out, the next step in the process would be to identify the relevant data points needed to create the segmented groups for the email marketing campaign. This type of data can be split into four sections:
   • Demographic: age, gender, geographic location, marital status, income, education Level
   • Psychographic: lifestyle, interests, intent
   • Relationship: sales funnel stage, type of customer, length of relationship
   • Behavioral: email engagement, website behavior, purchase history, product activity

   It is important to choose meaningful and relevant data points that truly alight with the goals of the email marketing campaign or strategy. Various types of data can be collected; however, only a few data points are relevant and can be used to determine success relative to its campaign or strategy. Using this data to determine the segmentation of potential leads on the email list, as well as ways to tailor content for more reliability and relevance within each individual segmented group, is of vital importance in order to find marketing success.

3. Automate Data Capture
   Good data is non-negotiable to the email segmentation strategy and is necessary for its success. Using an automated data-capturing tool can simplify this process and make data collection easy and mindless, allowing marketers to focus on more important content creation tasks. These tools can differentiate between two types of important data that can give fintechs essential insights and information into their audience:
   • Explicit data: Information subscribers input and give directly, such as their name, date of birth, and address. This type of data can be useful for demographic and relationship-based segmentation and can be collected through form submissions, product ratings, audience surveys, and user profiles
   • Implicit data: Information subscribers unintentionally give based on their consumer behavior. This includes pages they visit or resources they download. This type of data can be used for behavioral, psychographic, and relationship-based segmentation.
4. Write Content For Each Segment
   Finally, it is time for the heavy lifting. This is the step in which a fintech would write unique email content for each of their segments that would eventually be sent out through email marketing campaigns. Personalization within content can occur through various parts of the email, including the subject line, body copy, and call-to-action excerpts. Creating multiple iterations in advance can allow one’s fintech marketing team to mix and match the pre-made content and send out emails based on the individual segment and their preferences and needs.Using these four steps can allow one’s fintech to tackle the challenging art of email marketing and succeed at successfully finding and converting potential leads to onboard with a financial product or service.