by Dorottya Dvorak 
Segmentation lists are crucial for every email communication strategy, as they form the target audience you would like to reach. However, the focus can easily shift to the emails themselves, and away from the target group, resulting in campaign specific segmentation. There are some cases when that is ideal, but why not consider placing your audience at the centre of your strategy?
Why would you change your Segmentation Lists strategy?
Making changes to how your team builds Segmentation Lists is not always easy, but it is definitely beneficial. Here are a couple of reasons to consider making some changes:
- Your email communications will be centred around specific target audiences, therefore you can optimise the content to them. This strategy is known to increase performance rates, and customer experience.
- Campaign execution will be much quicker as you don’t need to build lists for every campaign. This gives you the opportunity to focus on perfecting your emails, and even try out some A/B testing.
- Frequency strategy will be easier to implement, where you can avoid over-mailing prospects. Bookmark this post to find out how to do that.
- Your Pardot will have less Dynamic Lists which can make your system faster.
So what do you need to do, you ask?
“Before beginning, plan carefully.” Open a blank document and take an audit of your existing strategy, while answering the following questions.
1. What emails do you send from Pardot?
Look at the list emails you have sent from Pardot and any Engagement Studio program you had running in the past 3 months. How many of them used the same Segmentation Lists?
2. Who are you targeting?
Based on the lists used in your recent email communications, you can separate your key target audiences. For each, write up what type of emails they receive, such as newsletters, webinar invitations, and on-boarding emails.
3. How frequently do you send them emails?
Once you have collated the emails and the lists, it’s time to review their frequency. Do you send monthly or quarterly newsletters? How about your running nurture programs, do they send emails every 7 or 14 days?
With that, you have completed the planning phase. You have a document with your main target groups identified, along with the type of emails they receive, broken down by their frequency. This is crucial to understand your current strategy and begin your new one.
How to implement your new strategy
Use the knowledge you gained during the planning phase to build your new Segmentation Lists in Pardot. Ideally you would have one dynamic list for each key target audience, but you can segment them further based on additional criteria (e.g. regions or countries) if required.
Once you have created your lists, present them to your team and explain the benefits of these lists. They should be used for all general email communications as the main Segmentation Lists.
As an additional step, you can build frequency lists for each of them to audit their usage on a regular basis. This will help you optimise the strategy on the long term, and ensure your prospects are not over-mailed.
Need more tips?
I hope you are now inspired to build smart Segmentation Lists that support your email communication strategy. If you are keen to do more, take a look at my tips to send successful emails.