What is email segmentation and how granular should your segments be?
Segment on what changes the message. Everything else is busywork.
Email segmentation is dividing your list so different people get different messages. The test for whether a segment is worth building: if it would not change the subject line, the offer, or the send time, do not build it.
Segments that earn their keep
- Lifecycle stage. A brand new subscriber and a five-year client should not get the same email. This is the highest-value cut for almost every business.
- What they asked about. The service or product line they showed interest in, captured at the form.
- Engagement level. Recent clickers can take more frequency. Non-engaged contacts should get less, not more.
- Industry or role, when the proof points genuinely differ. A law firm and a powersports dealer need different case examples.
- Geography, when service area, licensing or an event location actually differs.
Segments that usually do not earn their keep: tiny slices with fifty contacts, and combinations so specific that nobody has time to write for them. Over-segmentation is how a team ends up with forty lists and one email a quarter.
Active lists versus static lists
An active list updates itself as contacts meet or stop meeting the criteria. Use it for anything behavioral or lifecycle based. A static list is a frozen snapshot. Use it when you need the membership to stop changing, most importantly for suppression. LevelUp's master non-marketable suppression list is deliberately static, because an exclusion list that quietly removes people is worse than no exclusion list.
The unglamorous prerequisite
Segmentation runs on properties, and most portals have properties full of free text, three spellings of the same industry, and fields nobody has filled in since 2021. Fix that before building segments, or the segments will be confidently wrong. Use dropdowns instead of text fields wherever you can, and decide who owns each property.
One LevelUp convention worth copying: we do not use Customer or Previous Customer as a contact or company type. We use Client plus a separate Client Status field set to Active or Inactive, so a lapsed client is still identifiable as a client and can be segmented for win-back instead of disappearing.
Smart content lets one email serve several segments without building five versions, covered in our post on smart content.
Related: Can LevelUp Digital build custom HubSpot workflows and automations?. Can you migrate my data from another CRM to HubSpot?. What HubSpot Hubs do you work with?.