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Eden Stancill

Market Segmentation: Organize Your Email Subscribers + Boost Your Sales

Updated: Apr 3




I talk a lot about email lists because they are oh-SO-valuable for small businesses. Not all marketing avenues are created equal for all businesses, but email marketing is one that ALL businesses can benefit from…and market segmentation (which we’re about to talk about) will kick your email marketing up a notch! Here’s a quick recap of why email marketing is always the first thing I implement for new clients:


  1. Direct line of communication between you and your customers

  2. FREE (or usually really inexpensive) to set up, depending on the provider you choose

  3. EASY to automate – schedule emails days, weeks or months in advance

  4. Super effective at building relationships with customers and in turn, driving sales (when done correctly)

I talk about the first three bullet points all the time, but I really want to touch on the last one here. My clients and students are so frequently perplexed when it comes to content for their emails. I know I need an email list, but what do I actually SEND to people?


This is really important and really simple, so if your memory isn’t what it used to be, jot this down. If you want to build an engaged email list that drives sales, you need to provide value. But what’s valuable to one person may not necessary be valuable to another – and that’s where market segmentation comes into play (and turns emails into $$$).


I don’t know why my hypothetical business that I use for examples is always a landscaping company, but let’s roll with it. Let’s say that I own a landscaping company and I have a handful of informative blog posts on my website. One of the most popular posts is Container Gardening: for People Who Have a Green Thumb, but Little-to-no Green Space. This is a blog post entirely about how to grow plants in containers, and it’s geared towards people who don’t have a lot of yard to work with…maybe people who live in an apartment or a town home.


So someone lands on my website, reads this blog post, and within the blog post I have a cheat sheet called Best Container Plants for Small Spaces – a guide to what they should plant in their containers when they have limited space. When they sign up for my email list, they get instant access to the cheat sheet, and I now have their email address.


In order to build a relationship with this person through my marketing, I need to send them valuable information when I email them. If I start sending out emails like Best Time of the Year to Lay Sod or Timers for Your Sprinklers + Why Your Lawn Needs Them – these people aren’t getting much value from me…because information about a lawn probably doesn’t apply to them (I know this because they read and subscribed to a blog post all about container gardening for people with no lawn).


If I segmented my list, on the other hand, I would put these people into a group called “container gardening” or “no green space” so I know what will be of value to them and what won’t. If I’m sending out an email about sod or lawns in general, I know to exclude this group. The less you clutter someone’s inbox with irrelevant info, the more likely they are to pay attention to your emails when they receive them.


So when you’re building your email list, think about the people who are going to end up on it and what exactly their needs are. How can you segment your list so that people are getting the most value from you? Get started with my FREE Email Segmentation Worksheet! Using the worksheet as a guide, write down some categories that your subscribers may fall into, and then jot down some ideas under each for information that would be valuable to those subscribers. Hang onto the worksheet and as your list grows, add more categories or modify the ones you already have so that your list is always working for you!

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