Étienne Garbugli

“Creating Key User Segments The beauty with segmentation is that it can be used for more than email targeting. You can use your segmentation for tracking and reporting, to recruit candidates for interviews, and for quality assurance. If your segmentation doesn’t get you the right users, you want to find out as quickly as possible. Before starting to write emails, you’ll want to create key user segments. Those could be: people who haven’t signed up for your product (if the required data is available); people who signed up today; people who signed up in the last seven days; people who signed up in the last seven days, but didn’t engage, or didn’t activate; people who signed up in the last 30, 60 or 90 days and activated; inactive users; users whose trial is about to end or just ended and that you would eventually like to convert; paid subscribers in their first month; paid subscribers retained for two months or more; subscribers on annual plans; users who you think would be willing to refer your product to others; subscribers who cancelled; subscribers who cancelled more than once; or signups per specific acquisition channel. Don’t go too far, but do try to test real segments with real data. Let them run a few weeks. Do users flow through the way you’d expect them to? Go through random profiles in each of these segments and compare with the data from your database. Are those the users you’d expect to find in each of these segments? Any issues? You want to uncover issues with the implementation or your segmentation as early as possible. It’s easier if you do this—and much less costly in terms of mistakes—before you start sending emails than after. Make sure you can track users across different segments and that your segments truly are mutually exclusive when they need to be. Identify issues, adjust, and refine. This step will save your team a lot of headaches later on. As you test your segments, make them available to the rest of your team. Your colleagues can also help point out issues. At this point, if there aren’t any major issues, your setup is complete. Let’s get started sending some emails!”
― Étienne Garbugli, The SaaS Email Marketing Playbook: Convert Leads, Increase Customer Retention, and Close More Recurring Revenue With Email