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- 📈 7 Audience Segments To Track and Analyze
📈 7 Audience Segments To Track and Analyze
PLUS: See you in ATX..
Kieran Lenahan
February 17, 2025
Heading to ATX in a few weeks for the Newsletter Marketing Summit. Hit me up if you’ll be there and want to meet up.
Today, I’m sharing some segments of your email audience you should track and analyze.
Let’s get into it 👇️
Interesting Links 🔗
*These are affiliate links
We Are Not The Same
Not every subscriber is created equal.
Here are two subscribers we paid ~$0.40 for.
one of my favorite subscribers
$0.40 down the drain
Both came from Meta ads. But they are not the same.
Email is powerful because you can collect first party data that you own.
While social media gives you surface-level insights into your audience, email allows you to collect:
What they tell you (information): name, job title, salary, etc.
What they show you (behaviors): what they read, click, purchase
Most newsletter operators are collecting information from survey data (if you’re not yet, read this).
But many aren’t paying enough attention to their behaviors.
Within every audience, there are sub-audiences.
And understanding your sub-audiences can inform decisions you make around things like:
What content to create
Which products + services to launch
Who to target with paid ads (and who not to)
You average subscriber might have 45% open rates, but that’s an average.
You might have 5,000 subscribers who open 80% or more of your emails.
You might have 1,500 who never opened a single email.
Are you treating every subscriber the exact same?
Which segment of subscribers are you thinking about when you write any individual email?
Keep those questions in mind as you dig into the segments listed below.
Email Segments to Track and Analyze 📈
Your ability to pull these segments (and how long it takes) will vary based on your ESP.
If you’re using beehiiv, which is the platform we (and 80% of our clients) use, they’ve made this incredibly easy.
1. Subscribers who have opened 0 emails.
How many people are signing up for your newsletter, but never engaged?
This might tell you that:
you need to improve your onboarding flow/welcome sequence
your value prop isn’t compelling enough OR
that you’re acquiring the wrong audience
How many engaged previously, but haven’t opened a single email in the last 90 days?
This might tell you that you need to focus on retention.
Set up an automation to give these subscribers a chance to stay on the list. Otherwise, unsubscribe them or make them inactive so they don’t receive email sends.
💡 Consider excluding your entire email audience (active and inactive subscribers) from audience targeting in Meta. This will help you avoid paying money to reach subscribers who have already signed up for your newsletter.
Approaches to removal:
Aggressive: If someone receives their first 5 emails and opens 0 or has 0 opens in the first 28 days
Conservative: If someone has 0 opens in the last 90 days, send them a re-engagement email
In my experience, less than 5% of people who go through this automation will click the link to stay subscribed. And even fewer will become highly engaged after the fact.
2. Subscribers who have clicked on sponsorship links.
For sponsorship driven newsletters, you need to know what type of subscriber is engaging with your sponsors (and which sponsors perform best).
Use this segment to:
Understand who they are (demographics)
Reward them for engaging with the newsletter (surprise them with a gift)
Build lookalike audiences for Meta ads + find more subscribers like them
Export this segment along with any data you have on them, anonymize the data and upload it to your AI of choice. Ask it for any notable patterns or insights about who they are or what their behaviors might be telling you.
To build this segment in beehiiv, select “At least one (OR)”
Add a condition and select “Any email” under “Email data”
Select “Was” and “Clicked.”
Then tap the slider icon next to “Clicked” and type the sponsor’s base URL next to “with the link.”
Repeat for as many sponsors as you want to include in the segment.
Click Update Segment.
3. Subscribers who open more than 60% of your emails.
Especially in B2B, most (if not all) of your purchases or clients will come from people who are most highly engaged with your newsletter.
Similar to the last segment, dig into who is engaging most with your content.
You might realize that 80% of this segment signed up because they were looking for help with one specific problem. Or that they all lead teams at work. Or that they all have young kids.
What is this segment telling you through their demographics and behavior?
Double down on meeting their needs, solving their problems, and selling to them, NOT your average subscriber.
4. Subscribers who have bought from you.
Who buys from you? What do you know about their demographics and behavior?
Do they line up with who you think your ideal audience is?
How does this impact who you target for future growth?
5. Subscribers who have referred a friend.
This segment will likely overlap with segments 3 and 4.
People who refer friends are likely to be highly engaged.
Surprise them with a reward, say thank you, or incentivize them to keep referring.
6. Subscribers who have replied to your welcome email.
People who reply to your newsletters are a special kind of people.
This is more manual, but still possible to do quickly, especially if you have an email address/inbox dedicated to your newsletter.
Scrape the email of anyone who has ever taken the time to reply to one of your emails.
If you’re growing with paid ads, test building a lookalike audience from this population.
If you use Gmail, you can do that by following these steps:
Log in to your Gmail account
Click the nine-dot grid icon in the upper right-hand corner to open the Google Apps section
Click Contacts
Depending on how your Gmail is set up, you may need to click “Other contacts on the left hand menu. This will how you any email address that sent you an email.
Click the export icon towards the upper right corner of the screen.
7. Subscribers who have opened at least 1 email in the last 30 days.
Is this segment growing? Shrinking?
Is engagement going up over time? Down?
This segment will tell you about the state of your active subscribers.
If this segment is shrinking over time, you might have a:
leaky bucket (retention problem)
stagnant water (acquisition problem)
or both
Be Curious
There are many ways to slice and dice your audience.
Be curious.
Look for trends and ask questions like:
What is this telling us?
In light of this segment, should we do anything differently?
Cheers,
Isaac + Kieran 🫡
P.S. If you’re ready to invest $4k+ per month on growth, book a call here with the two guys pictured above 🫡