Saturday, April 22, 2017

How Gender Based Marketing Segmentation Saved Email Marketing

Email channel that for years had been known as one of the most effective marketing channels slowly became an underdog of digital marketing. Open rates and click through rates had been declining while conversion rate have plummeted. While from the first look quality of the leads remained consistent, the same offers and promotions that used to deliver results, were no longer performing. This change hasn't happened overnight but was consistent and sound across most of the industries.

SaaS businesses

SaaS businesses were the first to recognize the issue and identify the problem. As it often happens – the devil was hidden in the detail: AAOEM (American Association of Email Marketers) reported in 2016 annual review that the volume of promotional and informational emails delivered to an inbox of an average consumer increased 8.5x in the last 4 years alone. This means that consumer’s “undivided” attention had been divided 8.5x times than before. AAOEM was able to build direct correlation between consumer’s response rate and volume of emails delivered to an inbox.

Email marketers attempted various segmentation and consumer personalization techniques until they discovered that adding gender based marketing segmentation improves open rates by over 35% and conversion rates by over 25%. It appears that personalizing design, content and offer based on consumer’s gender was the only variable capable to improve all conversion rates with no extra effort.

male or female names


There are number of ways to add consumer’s gender. The most complicated and not always effective is to start asking consumers their gender as part of registration process. While this approach might deliver the most accurate insights, it would take time to aggregate the data, consumers added to the database before gender field is added, would still have no gender attached, not to mention that adding  a new field as part of the acquisition funnel would decrease conversion rates by 14%. Alternative solution would be using a tool such as NameGenderPro.com that already done all the work for you. Name Gender Pro scrapped official government databases of first names by gender and offers clean and consolidated list of over 177k unique first names broken down by male vs female vs. unisex names. Names by Gender are captured in csv file and marketers can simply download this file from NamGenderPro.com, match this file against their own database and start sending gender specific email campaigns

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