Segmentation and Personalization: A Unified Path to Better Brand Experience

Key takeaways Email segmentation and personalization are both ways to make email marketing more relevant for your subscribers, but the way they work is a little different. Using email segmentation and personalization together can boost engagement, which sends positive signals to ISPs that—in turn—boost deliverability in the long run. Email list hygiene and personalization data management are foundational for segmentation and personalization that your customers (and stakeholders) love. With email personalization tools and deliverability insights, you can build better segments, personalize content at scale, and keep an eye on metrics like inbox placement and engagement

Inboxes are noisy places. It’d be grand if your subscribers only had eyes for your messages, but in reality, you’re competing with work emails, personal updates, and that promo code they’ve been waiting months for. Landing in the inbox and standing out are getting harder than ever.

The way to boost email engagement is to send better messages that build stronger relationships. That means less fluff and more substance. Less ‘one-size-fits-all’ and more ‘that’s so me.’

To get there, you need email segmentation and personalization working together.

Table of contents

• Email segmentation vs email personalization
• The power of combining segmentation and personalization
• Why we can’t treat segmentation and personalization separately anymore
• The engagement–deliverability flywheel
• How to unite segmentation and personalization
• How brands are winning with segmentation and personalization today
• Metrics to help monitor success: from opens to inbox placement
• Putting segmentation and personalization into practice

Email segmentation vs. email personalization

Segmentation and personalization in email marketing are two paths to the same destination: more relevant emails. The way each of these email moves works is different, though.

What is email segmentation?

Email segmentation sorts your customers into groups based on traits they have in common. With segmentation driving relevant content, email marketing ROI can yield $50 for every dollar spent. In fact, companies that see higher ROI from email marketing (36:1 to 50:1) are most likely to have between 25% and 50% of their marketing team dedicated to email—and you can bet they’re segmenting all of their sends.

By tailoring messages to customer segments, you increase engagement and directly boost sales, as subscribers are more likely to act on content that reflects their interests.

Example email segmentation groups include:

• Customer lifecycle
• Demographics
• Location
• Industry
• Interests
• Habits
• Pain points
• Device

What is email personalization?

Email personalization uses subscriber data and dynamic content to create highly relevant, individualized email experiences. It goes beyond basic tactics like inserting a recipient’s name into the subject line or body text. Instead, true email personalization tailors the entire email content, including images, product recommendations, time of send, and offers, based on a recipient’s preferences, behaviors, and characteristics.

Example email personalization criteria include:

• Site behavior
• Purchase history
• Shopping preferences
• Location

	Email Segmentation	Email Personalization
What it is	Grouping customers based on shared traits and behaviors	Tailoring messages to individual recipients based on their unique data
Examples	Customer lifecycle Demographics Industry Device	Purchase history Site activity Preferences Location
Email example	A welcome sequence or reactivation email	Abandoned cart email or personalized sale promo
When to use it	When you have a broad sense of customer groups or buying stages	When you want to turn customer data into hyper-relevant content they’ll engage with
Why we love it	Great for efficiently delivering relevant content to well-defined audience segments with tools that are standard for most email sending tools.	Ideal for boosting engagement with tailored, one-to-one experiences your subscribers expect. (But it’s harder to scale without the right tools in place.)

The power of combining segmentation and personalization in email marketing

Segmentation and email personalization are useful on their own, but you get the best results when you use them together.

Segmentation without personalization is too broad. Yes, using email segmentation is better than not. These days, though, segmentation is a bit of an entry requirement for a solid email program.  You can’t rely solely on it to build connections with your audience.

“If the point of email is to help create and foster a relationship with your subscribers, there’s no way to do that without including email personalization. An email without personalization is like limiting a conversation to small talk – ‘how’s the weather? How about them (local sports team)?’ This is fine and dandy if you’re not that invested in the conversation, but if someone is in the middle of experiencing a hurricane or doesn’t like sports, you’ve stuck your foot in your mouth and made it harder to build a relationship with them.“

Carin Slater
Senior Technical Producer at Stitch

Personalization without segmentation is too fragmented. Dynamic content tools let you send different versions without creating a ton of designs, but it’ll be hard to wrangle your ideas if you open yourself up to too many personalization possibilities. Plotting email personalization and the customer journey alongside each other keeps everything organized.

Segmentation and personalization working together is just right. Segmenting your target audience keeps your ideas and campaigns organized, and then personalization gives email campaigns the extra zing to really stand out.

When you use email segmentation and personalization together, you strike a balance between individuality at scale. For example, Bulk Powders used Litmus Personalize to collect health goals from more than 20,000 customers and used that information to curate unique journeys for their diverse audience spanning 12 countries.

Why we can’t treat segmentation and personalization separately anymore

We’ll look at examples of companies benefiting from combining email segmentation and personalization later on, but there are also larger trends to be aware of.

Basic personalization or segmentation doesn’t cut it anymore

The evolution of personalization has been decades in the making, and we’re way past plugging in a merge tag and calling it a day. There’s a whole new world of personalization trends to try, like dynamic and real-time content, that can differentiate your message in a busy inbox.

“Research has shown that emails that are personalized with just the first name and it’s not continued into the body of the email are actually as likely to hurt email performance as it is to help it. People have seen this trick. So most consumers see this as a big disconnect when they encounter it on one level and then dig down deeper, and it seems like it’s just content for everybody. They don’t like that. They feel tricked.“

Chad S. White
Head of Research at Oracle

Spam placement is on the rise (and AI might play a role)

Validity’s Deliverability Benchmark Report found that global spam placement rates almost doubled from Q1-Q4 2024. Plus, AI-generated summaries of emails might inaccurately reflect the content and lead to reduced engagement and increased spam complaint activity. That means you need to do everything you can to strengthen connections with subscribers and boost engagement rates to support deliverability.

Email volume keeps increasing

Overall email volume in 2024 was up 13% compared to 2020 and is expected to grow another 13% by 2026. Catchy headlines can help, but understanding what users want and need, how they’d like to be engaged with, and then delivering that makes the real difference.

“We need to talk about personalization. Email is both at an all-time high in volume and in return on investment. The roller coaster of the past few years has grown our dependence on email in more ways than we could have ever imagined.“

Cynthia Price
SVP of Marketing at Validity

The engagement–deliverability flywheel

Anyone who’s ever tried to calculate marketing attribution knows that marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum—it’s more of an ecosystem with sometimes unexpected links.

One link you might be overlooking is the impact of email engagement on deliverability and how segmentation and personalization in email play a part.

Here’s how. Combining segmentation and personalization leads to better audience engagement, which sends positive signals to ISPs. Then, your positive sender reputation keeps you out of the spam folder, meaning more people see your message. Using Validity Everest helps you monitor and improve your inbox placement.

But there’s more! When you maximize who sees and engages with your wonderful emails, you learn more about your customers to use for future personalization.

Unlock 2025 Inbox Benchmarks Now

Download Validity’s 2025 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report and learn how your inbox placement compares before your next send.

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How to unite segmentation and personalization

You want to create emails that people love, but sometimes, it feels like herding cats. Litmus’ State of Email Report 2025 found that the top personalization challenges are developing personalized content efficiently (17%), collecting and analyzing the data needed for personalization (16%), and measuring the impact of personalization on email performance (15%).

Here’s how to step through a plan and tools to make your best emails yet.

Step 1: Focus on a goal

Overhauling your email program takes time, and it’s best to do it in smaller, focused sprints. Start with an end goal in mind, like:

• Shortening the time between first subscribing and making a purchase
• Reducing unsubscribes
• Increasing repeat purchases
• Driving more clicks to your website
• Winning back cold subscribers

Step 2: Build smart customer segments

Next, think about the data you have (or need) to create segments based on your goal. For example, you could target recent shoppers for repeat purchases or people in a particular industry for an upcoming webinar promo.

Customer data is split into three categories:

1. Zero-party data is explicitly given to you by your audience, either through surveys or email polls or purchase data. Anytime you’re asking your subscribers a question and they answer it, it’s zero-party data.
2. First-party data is the individual-level data collected from your audience, like browsing data from your website, shopping history, or social media engagement.

Second-party data is purchased from another company—basically, someone else’s first-party data. Second-party data gives you context and scale, helping you understand consumer trends, analyze the competitive landscape, or conduct research.

Step 3: Layer rules in Litmus Personalize

Your email really starts to shine when you add in personalized elements with Litmus Personalize. If we consider the previous example of driving repeat purchases for recent customers, you could use rule-based images to showcase products your customers are most interested in in a quick 4-step process:

1. Simply set your conditions, parameters, and merge tags.
2. Upload a custom image and click-through URL for each
3. Define your fallback experience (what your audience will see if they don’t fit into the segments defined above)
4. Easily preview your images and then copy and paste your HTML into your email!

Step 4: Test before you send

You’ve come too far to send a broken link now. Using Litmus pre-send testing lets you preview rendering, check for broken links, and validate personalization rules and spam risk before you hit send.

Step 5: Measure and iterate

After you send you get to learn what worked and what didn’t. Litmus Email Analytics gives you engagement data while Validity Everest gives you intel to create campaigns that convert.

How brands are winning with segmentation and personalization today

Who doesn’t love a little email inspiration? Here’s how brands and consultants combine email personalization and segmentation.

ByLaurenJean increased email click-through rates 53% with Litmus

Lauren Jean, an Email Specialist and Owner of ByLaurenJean, used Litmus Personalize to A/B test adding live polls to a client’s emails. The live poll email variation had a 53% higher click-through rate than the email without the poll. The data gathered through the polls could then be used to segment and personalize future campaigns.

“We were excited to add live polls to our email strategy because we wanted to see what content resonated best to gain information for future campaigns and segmentation,” says Lauren Jean, Email Specialist and Owner of ByLaurenJean.

Kate Spade automated personalized new arrival emails for a 50% increase in conversion rate

Kate Spade has new arrivals all the time, and sharing them with customers in a timely manner matters. However, manually managing email personalization isn’t feasible with a small team. So, the Kate Spade team first used email engagement to split customers into segments based on interests, like handbags vs. jewelry. Then, they use automated product feeds to personalize emails with fresh items. The result is a 50% increase in conversion rates, a 36% jump in CTR, and a 174% increase in revenue.

“We have new products arriving all the time and our new arrivals emails are key to our CRM strategy. We needed a smart way to manage new in and move from a one-size-fits-all email. We’re a small team so we needed automation to help us achieve our personalization goal, we simply couldn’t build a version of the email for every product category. We’re now listening to what our customers would like from us and using Kickdynamic to show them what they want,” says Chloe Temple, Ecommerce Marketing Director (Europe)

Puma automated email image personalization to drive a 35% average order value increase

Adding a first name to a subject line doesn’t stand out as much as it used to. But a first name inside an image? That’s new. Puma promoted customized jerseys by showing customers exactly what they’d get–their last name featured on the back of a jersey using last name data from its CRM. The result was a 360% increase in click-through rate, and a 35% increase in average order value.

Learn from the best

Your favorite brands use Litmus to deliver flawless email experiences. Discover the ROI your emails can achieve with Litmus.

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Metrics to help monitor success: from opens to inbox placement

Putting segmentation and personalization into practice

Theories and ideas are fun, but nothing beats the thrill of seeing your segmentation and personalization work actually pay off. Here’s what to do next to keep learning and put what you’ve seen into practice:

• Audit your emails. Your goal is to pick a starting spot. You can choose the old campaign that needs a refresh, an important email that’s underperforming, or one that already has your creative ideas flowing. Benchmark its performance so you can compare the change.
• Assess your data. Assess your data. What customer data do you already collect? Where does it live? What could you use that you’re not tapping into yet? You can start testing faster and easier if you lean on data you have on standby, and a little email personalization planning goes a long way.
• Use interactive elements to gather new data. Live polls and scratch-offs are fun ways for subscribers to interact with messages and send you signals about their interests and preferences.
• Bookmark more inspo. Explore case studies from Litmus customers, check out these inspiring personalized emails, or review email personalization best practices. We also have free email templates if you want design and development help.
• Run a mini test. Use Litmus Personalize to build your new message and then test how they perform. Here’s an A/B testing refresher in case you need help planning.

Whether you’re aiming for better clicks, conversions, or customer connections, the best results come from actually trying things out. Start small, learn as you go, and let each test bring you closer to the kind of personalization in email marketing that truly delivers.

Stand out in crowded inboxes

Create 1:1 experiences at scale with Litmus Personalize. Use live polls, countdown timers, and more to captivate subscribers.

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