Negative Segmentation: How to Determine Which Email Subscribers to Exclude

In a perfect world, sending the right emails to the right people is easy. In a single action, you’ll have excluded—for lack of a better term—the “wrong” people. 

But in the real world, it’s not so simple. 

Excluding irrelevant subscribers from campaigns requires your full attention. That’s what negative segmentation is all about. 

But how do you determine which subscribers to exclude? 

Now, we’re not talking about suppression lists. We’re interested in active, engaged subscribers. Not those who no longer want your emails and are better suppressed. 

But which active, engaged subscribers? — that’s the question… 

Because your conversion rates are modest; there isn’t much sales happening, even though people are engaging with your emails. 

In this blog post, we’ll be trying to solve this Rubik’s-puzzle of email marketing. Here are some of the rotations, if you will, we’ll try:

• Understand Subscriber Preferences
  
• Pick Behavioral over Personal Data
  
• Learn to Wait for Your Subscribers
  
• Distinguish between Forms of Intent
  
• Distinguish between Types of Buyer
  
• Choose the Right Amount of Triggers
  
• Create Smart as Well as Specific Content

1. Understand Subscriber Preferences

One of the lessons we’ve learned from doing email marketing for a decade now is that you can’t take subscribers’ word for everything. 

Here’s why: Subscribers are not the best judges of their own preferences. They’re often unaware of their own interests and needs. 

As a result, it’s critical you focus more on what subscribers do than what they say. Distinguish between their expressed and implied preferences, in other words. This is something that Chad S. White notes in his book Email Marketing Rules. 

If a subscriber has expressed interest in Oxford shoes but spends their time looking at flats, you should exclude that subscriber from the ‘Formal footwear’ segment. 

That’s a starting point for modifying the relevance criteria for that particular subscriber. The key is to estimate relevance on the basis of behavior, not words.  

On this principle, there can be multiple cart abandonment segments, not just one. So for example, those who habitually abandon carts on purpose to avail discount offers should not receive incentivized reminders.

2. Pick Behavioral over Personal Data

Email marketers tend to overestimate subscriber birthdays. 

It’s critical that you have your subscribers’ personal data. Offering incentives on people’s birthdays works. 

But not always. Because there could be outliers. And these outliers will have signaled their preferences for birthday emails. 

‘But who wouldn’t like a gift on their birthday?’ — is not a question marketers need to ask. You’re to reward each subscriber according to their preferences. 

So if you’ve segments by birthday date, you should exclude indifferent subscribers from these segments. 

In fact, you can create a super-segment of just these indifferent subscribers. And you can send them other triggered emails on their birthdays. 

Read More: Best Email Unsubscribe Examples

3. Learn to Wait for Your Subscribers

‘Triggered’ has often made email marketers trigger-happy. 

Full credit to leveraging triggered emails. But you’re dealing ultimately with human beings, not data points. Which is why action-triggered emails can often flop. 

Mr. X left an item in their cart. That’s a trigger for a cart abandonment email. 

But hold on! If you know Mr. X has, in the past, come back in a day or two to complete the checkout, you can be sure they don’t need a cart abandonment email. 

If you’re a wise email marketer, you wouldn’t have bracketed Mr. X with the typical abandoners, right? Mr. X doesn’t belong in that segment. 

Learn to wait for your subscribers. Not everyone always needs a push. Distinguish between slow buyers and abandoners. 

4. Distinguish between Forms of Intent

If someone spent considerable time looking at your product category, you shouldn’t automatically put them in the high-intent category. 

Instead, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• Is this a new subscriber?
  
• Has the subscriber made a purchase yet?
  
• How many purchases have they made?
  
• How often do they buy?
  
• How often do they explore the product page?
  
• Where do they go after viewing the product page?

A single behavior can have that many layers and more. High-intent is precious. Treat it preciously. 

You don’t want to send a “new product” email to subscribers who’ve rarely gone beyond the intent stage. 

You should try other means to convert them, such as sending buying guides, customer testimonials, and “Tell us what you like” surveys for progressive profiling. 

5. Distinguish between Types of Buyer

Yes, there are all kinds of buyers. But for the moment, we’re concerned with two types: low-value and high-value buyers. 

Remember, this also includes high-value and low-value products. 

So imagine you’re a winery and you’ve launched a new wine.

If your new wine is expensive, don’t send that new arrival email to those who have historically bought cheaper wines from you. 

Now, there could be exceptions. 

If a low-value buyer has left an expensive wine in their cart, do send them a cart abandonment email (after having analyzed their historical organic time to purchase data). 

On the other hand, if a high-value subscriber has not shown any interest in your expensive new wine but has left a cheaper alternative in their cart, refrain from sending them a cart abandonment reminder. The product is not worth that much.  

As you can see, you can’t approach even your most loyal customers with a one-size-fits-all mindset.

6. Choose the Right Amount of Triggers

Imagine you’ve created a segment for browse abandonment. It includes, say, 50 subscribers who’ve more or less habitually exhibited browse abandonment behavior. 

Should you send the browse abandonment email to all 50 people the next time they abandon your website pages? 

By now, you know you shouldn’t. 

If one subscriber out of the 50 explored a product category, then abandoned it, and came back in a few hours to explore another product category, you should send just one browse abandonment email, not two. 

Similarly, if a subscriber browsed your page for just a few seconds, don’t send them a browse abandonment email, even though they are technically abandoners and belong in the same segment.  

In other words, you exclude these subscribers from the browse abandonment segment. Negative segmentation.

So you need to determine how many triggered emails a subscriber should receive in a given period of time. 

7. Create Smart as Well as Specific Content

Yes, customers say they like to receive personalized emails from their favorite brands. And that’s true. 

But as marketers, we should be careful not to overdo it. 

Because that’s a general fact, and the preference for personalized communication may vary from person to person. 

Take browsing once again. The good email marketer would determine the optimal time to send a triggered email. It could be immediately or not. 

But the smart email marketer, if the send is immediate, would know that in spite of customers’ preference for personalized emails, they also prefer not being creeped out. 

What if the subscriber whose action triggered that browse abandonment email belonged in that category of customers? 

A triggered email with a header, “We saw you noticing…” wouldn’t be the best choice in that case. It’s too obvious you’ve been watching the subscriber. 

Which means the subscriber, although belonging in the browse abandonment segment, shouldn’t receive such a direct email. In short, you exclude them. 

Instead, the content for that subscriber should be oblique, even though they might know it’s triggered by their action. 

Take the Fancy Out of ‘Relevance’

Words like relevance, personalized, segmentation, etc., can remain just that: words. But when it comes down to cents and dollars, it’s not that straightforward, is it?

The key takeaway from everything we’ve discussed is that the individual often trumps the segment. 

They may be in the right segment. But how they engage, how they react or don’t, how they decide, how sooner or later they take action, etc., are critical parameters. 

We could only try some of the rotations in this post. You could go on turning the sides endlessly. The right kind of email marketing is always in a flux. In the real world, your methodologies are challenged every time, and you must rely on intuition and logic.

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