By: Dean Knuth, Grand Canyon Whitewater
You have females on your trips. You have males. This applies to everyone that is part of America Outdoors. Why not create content that speaks directly to these groups?
At Grand Canyon Whitewater we have had success with segmenting our emails by gender. We first started experimenting with gender segmentation on our merchandise emails that we send to current and former guests. The example is: women get a picture of a woman wearing our women’s purple rain jacket and men get a photo of a male wearing the men’s blue rain jacket. Easy-peasy.
According to a Campaign Monitor study, “Marketers have noted a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns.” Now, I can’t say that we’ve seen exactly that but our analytics do show an increase in our e-commerce conversion rate, transactions and revenue. As an example: we just recently sent a campaign with specific gender segmentation for merchandise items. The email sent to women with images of our reservation specialist Amanda wearing the purple rain jacket sold much better than the men’s jacket. Some 80% of sales were of the women’s jacket, while the men’s jacket accounted for only 7%.
Beyond the nuts and bolts analytics of doing something like this - it just makes sense! A woman would likely feel more comfortable and more likely to purchase if she is getting a picture of another woman wearing the clothing she is interested in. That is what I love about these ‘low-hanging fruit’ marketing tricks. This is something that we probably all know, and it just takes a small amount of effort to implement.
The Process of Email Segmentation
We are lucky in that we have gender as a built in field for our online forms via Arctic Reservations. This makes exporting a list super easy to see which category they fall into. We do have a decent amount of ‘unknowns’ though too as this field isn’t required. With these we will blend both the male and female emails into one to have broader appeal.
It doesn’t stop with email. We run a Facebook campaign with the same metrics - showing the women their gender specific image and the men their gender specific image.
Now that I’ve got you thinking about segmentation just imagine the possibilities! Segment and send emails to former guests who went on a specific trip type or former guests or people who inquired but didn’t book with you.
The point is that you don’t have to be paying a large email marketing platform like Hubspot hundreds of dollars each month to do this for you. You can do it all in MailChimp or Campaign Monitor simply. It does take a little work to get your clients segmented in the first place but when you see the results - it is worth it. We’re in the age of targeted marketing now and I can’t think of a better place to start your segmentation!
About the Author:
Dean Knuth is the Director of Marketing for Grand Canyon Whitewater.
Email: info@grandcanyonww.com
Phone: 800-343-3121
