Email Segmentation Strategy for Personalised Marketing in The Financial Sector

Personalised marketing is about serving up content that is personal and relevant to your audience. One of the best ways to do this is to create a segmentation strategy that allows you to target specific interest groups within your customer database. Segmenting customers into interest groups means that your marketing communications are more likely to reach the people who are most likely to take action, whether that be opening an email, taking up an offer, making an instant booking or purchase or clicking through to consume more of your content.Targeting people who are more likely to take action wastes less budget, increases overall email delivery due to less ESP complaints, and most importantly, keeps your customers engaged with future content.Airship teamed up with a client to implement a segmentation strategy for personalised email broadcasting. Our client supplies bank accounts via visa debit style cards that can be used by employees to access their wages in store, online, and over the phone. Our client partnered up with various retailers and service providers to give discounts, cashback and other special offers when a purchase was made using the card.

Using Visa Debit Card Transactions to Segment Customer Purchasing Preferences

Airship custom built a CMS to facilitate the sending of personalised email broadcasts to our client’s customer database. The CMS was built to intuitively fill out Airship’s email template according to customer’s transactional data, and to automatically send emails with relevant content to the right audiences according to the interest group that they fell in to.This involved two stages. First, Airship teamed up with an international supplier of end-to-end pre-paid payment solutions. We took a feed of data on a daily basis from around 36,000 retailer codes. From these codes we created eight segments that define the content that the customer receives. The weight of each segment was determined by the number of codes that the customer had interacted with and the frequency of use. All of this information is stored transactionally against each customer record. For example, a customer who used the card to purchase a videogame would receive content according to which of the eight segmented interest groups they fell in to.The next stage was to populate the email template with different types of content and offers relevant to each interest segment. This was done automatically using an algorithm to populate the email template with content and offers according to the different interest segments. This meant that one email broadcast could be sent to the whole of the customer database without the need to manually send to each interest group every time an email was broadcast.

Hitting the Goal - The Customer Journey

The client defined success at the start of the project which enabled us to create a customer journey to push customers through to the clients revenue goal. We tailored the content based on the stage the customer had reached, automatically inserting the content relevant to the next stage.This was done by using Airship’s email broadcasting console. Airship’s console stored records of card user’s data, including their contact details, method by which they wish to be contacted, offers they have interacted with and last time they used the card. This data was then used to tailor content to encourage customers to move further along the customer journey - from registering the card to becoming a regular user.

Email Broadcasting Segmentation Strategy - The Results

Tailoring content so that it is personal and relevant to customers increases the click, open, and read rates of email broadcasts. It also makes customers more likely to take action by taking up offers that appeal to their personal interests. Segmenting customers in to groups according to what stage of the customer journey they are at allows emails to be sent to those who have shown engagement with your product or services, meaning that they are more likely to take up offers in the future.Overall, personalised marketing through customer segmentation leads to greater levels of understanding: who your customers are, what they like, and what they do facilitate more accurate targeting of email broadcasts with content and offers that they are more likely to take up. As a result, our client was able to partner with more companies to bring more rewards to employees of the temporary labour market. Offering a personalised marketing strategy allowed our client to attract new businesses and users of their service, giving them a valuable edge over their competitors.