Email engagement is a segmentation problem

The internet is full of tactics. Word counts for the subject line. Emoji placement. The optimal send time. Curiosity hooks. A/B tests on three-word variations. The tactics are not worthless. They are producing single-digit improvements on a number that segmentation can move by more significantly more.

"A communication that feels personalised and therefore relevant will achieve better engagement than one that is 'one size fits all'," says SIVV co-founder Adam Simms. "SIVV helps increase engagement by presenting customers with the right message at the right time."

The subject line is not where the click is won

Most of what passes for personalisation in email is the customer's first name in the greeting line. It is better than nothing, but it is a long way from what a marketing team should be satisfied with.

The meaningful form of personalisation is a message that reflects what the customer has actually done with the brand. A customer who has bought in a specific category three times gets a different campaign from one who has not bought in six months. A lapsed high-spender gets a different campaign from an active customer whose next-best category is obvious from their behaviour. A discount-sensitive customer gets a different campaign again, if they get one at all.

When most brands send email, the segmentation is product-led or calendar-led. The category is in season. The promotion is running. Everyone who has opted in gets the send. The result is a typically average click rate, and a conversion that defaults to whoever was already going to buy.

The marketing calendar is a weak brief

The problem is visible in where the largest gains come from. "Typically, the largest increases in click rate are seen with brands where there is the existence of a standard marketing calendar, but a lack of regular customer (rather than product) segmented and targeted communications," says Simms.

That is a tidy way of saying most retail email programs have a calendar full of what is being sold and very little ongoing consideration of who it is being sold to. The fix is not a bigger calendar or a smaller one. It is a layer of customer-behaviour segmentation running alongside it, so that what goes out on any given day reflects the recipient, not only the trading plan.

SIVV builds that segmentation continuously, using the customer's actual history with the brand to define the most relevant next message, and how that message should be framed. The marketing calendar stays in place. What changes is who inside each send receives which version, and who should not be in the send at all.

Engagement is leading, not lagging

Click rate is often read as a soft metric. The sort of number that looks good in a board pack but does not correlate to changes in the P&L. That read is wrong, because it ignores the direction of travel.

"Engagement is the precursor to conversion," says Simms. "Engagement rates provide an indicator of how compelling a communication to a customer has been, or how much purchase intent the communication has created."

Click Rate is a leading indicator, not a lagging one. It tells a marketing team how well the message is connecting with the customer before that connection has had a chance to turn into revenue. A rising Click Rate on a segmented campaign is a reasonable early signal that conversion will follow. A flat Click Rate across an unsegmented send is a reasonable early signal that it will not.

What 1.67x actually looks like

The commercial outcome of moving segmentation upstream of the send is not subtle. On average, SIVV's approach to email segmentation and content matching increases click rates by 1.67x. One luxury fashion retailer lifted its CTR by 2x. An online gifting business posted a 1.9x improvement.

Those numbers come with the usual caveats. Engagement rates vary by industry, geography, brand strength, list composition, and send frequency. A 1.67x lift on a benchmark of 1% is a very different commercial event from a 1.67x lift on 6%. "The focus should therefore be improving performance based upon your own brand's benchmark," says Simms.

The point is not the absolute number. It is the direction of the gain and where it comes from. The lift is not coming from better copy or cleverer subject lines. It is coming from a smaller, better-targeted send, with the recipient's actual behaviour informing the message they receive.

Where the next improvement is hiding

The next performance movement of Click Rate is almost never in the subject line. It is in the segmentation that decides who is in the send, and the behavioural signal that decides what they see when they are.

Retailers running serious customer programs have moved this work out of the email team's copy review and into the segmentation layer that sits above the campaign tool. The email still goes out. The marketing calendar still exists. The click rate moves because the recipient is a better match for the message, not because the message has been rewritten one more time.

Email engagement is not a creative problem. It is a segmentation problem, and the numbers respond accordingly when it is treated as one.

‍

About SIVV

SIVV is the customer intelligence and decisioning platform built for marketers who want to know what's actually working.

We sit above your marketing platforms, combining:

• Sophisticated customer intelligence (churn prediction, lifecycle segmentation, propensity modelling)
• Scientific campaign measurement (randomised control groups for every campaign)
• True incremental revenue reporting (revenue that reconciles to your actual business performance)

Clients across telecommunications, retail, gaming, entertainment, and travel use SIVV to:

• Measure true incremental revenue for every campaign
• Identify which audiences and offers drive real lift
• Make budget allocation decisions based on incremental ROI
• Optimise marketing performance based on what actually moves the needle

Stop optimising against attribution. Start measuring incrementality.

Learn more at sivv.net or contact us to discuss how incremental measurement can transform your marketing performance.