Jimmy Kim argues most DTC brands under $20M create too many email segments, like "engage 30" and "post-purchase day 3," then send the same generic email to all of them anyway. He recommends five core segments instead: engaged, unengaged, customers, prospects, and VIP.
Most brands are over-segmenting, like dramatically over-segmenting. I've seen it all.
I personally love this. This is one of my favorite. Can you keep going?
Dude, I see so many brands. I was just in an account right now before this pod here today, and they had like 47 segments of VIP, repeat 1 time, engage 30, engage 60, engage 90, browse didn't buy, abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, post-purchase day 3, post-purchase day 14, and yada, yada, yada.
So let me guess, if you were to ask the retention team, the retention marketer, they're going to all say, well, dude, I'm just doing personalization. Is that correct? That's right.
And the problem is that most brands don't have the volume or the content to actually serve those segments differently the way they want to do it.
So what happens when someone does this?
So what happens is you have a campaign team. They're either trying to rewrite 47 different versions of an email, which is terrible, or more likely they write one email and they send it to all these segments. So why did you even build these segments? Here's the context behind it. For brands doing, let's say, sub-$20 million, which is going to be a majority of the people in the world in D2C, you need to maybe have 5 to 7 segments that may matter. Things like engaged, Unengaged, customers, prospects, VIP, I guess about 5, really, that's it.
