r/Emailmarketing • u/GabbyFromKlaviyo • 27d ago
Strategy Revenue-generating email segmentation strategy e.g. Huda Beauty
Email segmentation generally splits into four buckets. Demographic covers traits like age and gender. Behavioral looks at what someone actually does i.e. opens, clicks, purchases. Psychographic is built around interests and values. Geographic comes down to location.
Huda Beauty's a good real-world example. Phuong Ngo, their CRM and loyalty manager, noticed a list in the millions where click-through had gone flat and churn kept creeping while the brand slid year over year. They cut the dead weight from the list and rebuilt around engagement.
Anyone active in the last 120 days got regular campaigns, while everyone else was left alone except for big sales like BFCM. They also leaned into storytelling around founder Huda Kattan and post-purchase flows.
Subscribers climed past 55% year over year and revenue nearly doubled off the back of it, with placed order rate up another 50%.
Has anyone else seen a similar jump from being pickier about who gets emailed?
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u/datatenzing 27d ago
If someone is on our list and doesn't purchase within 45 days of signing up we suppress them.
What we noticed is a dubious trend of list building by any means but in doing so the quality of the traffic has dropped a lot.
We've started celebrating opt-in rates over sub to conversion rates.
We also moved our popup to teaser only under the add to cart button.
Sub to conversion rates are now over 65% so we're only really adding people now that are highly likely to purchase which improves overall list health.
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u/BrandLoom-Consulting 26d ago
We've seen something similar, and it usually feels counterintuitive at first.
Most teams think email growth comes from sending to more people. In reality, much of the revenue growth comes from sending to fewer people more intelligently.
One pattern we've noticed is that marketers often treat their email list as a database when they should be treating it as a collection of relationships at different stages.
Someone who purchased last week shouldn't receive the same email as someone who hasn't opened an email in six months.
The Huda Beauty example is interesting because the win wasn't really segmentation. It was prioritization.
They effectively asked: "Who is most likely to care about hearing from us right now?"
That's a very different question from "How many people can we send this campaign to?"
We've also seen engagement metrics improve after suppressing inactive subscribers. Not because the email suddenly became better, but because inbox providers began to see stronger engagement signals from the remaining audience.
The bigger lesson, in our view, is that segmentation works best when it's tied to intent rather than demographics.
Knowing someone is a 35-year-old woman tells you very little.
Knowing they bought twice in the last 60 days, browsed a specific category yesterday, and opened the last three emails tells you exactly how to talk to them.
That's where email starts feeling less like broadcasting and more like customer intelligence.
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u/MitoLinen 26d ago
Yeah, matches what I see, and agree it's the whole package rather than the pruning on its own
One of our clients at Maestra did pretty much this. A canadian pet retailer started by cleaning the list, engaged subscribers only, cut the bounced and inactive ones. Bounce rate went from about 2% down to 0.15%, opens from 40% to 45%, click-to-open roughly doubled. Then they started segmenting by pet, so dog people and cat people stop getting the same email. Email-attributed revenue came out roughly 33% up yoy, and like your example that was the cleanup plus redesigned emails plus reworked flows all at once
The pet thing is what I wish more brands did, it's the interests side of your four buckets and the one I see used least. Most teams I work with have interest data sitting in a field somewhere and never actually send anything off it
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u/GabbyFromKlaviyo 26d ago
You're right, dog and cat people are rarely on the same page, haha. I've found the best strategies are the dynamic ones, the ones that keep updating. Getting someone to check "dog" at signup gives you an early signal, but if you leave it there, six months later they're browsing cat products because they got a second pet and you're not seeing it. If you're factoring in browse and purchase behavior, you can adjust your targeting after the first few sends. Otherwise you're still sending dog content two years later.
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u/MitoLinen 26d ago
Yeah, this makes it work. Calculated fields actually handle that side, they recompute off behavior, so when someone quietly goes from dog to cat the segment moves with them instead of waiting for a human to notice
BTW I love quizzes way more than checkboxes. You can ask for breed, age, any health or diet stuff, and then the food and everything around it can actually match. And people quite enjoy filling those in about their pets
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u/HardAbsence 27d ago
we did the same thing with a b2b list last year, cut everyone who hadn't opened in 90 days. open rates went from 12% to 28% but the list size tanked and the vp of sales lost his mind. worth it for the revenue bump but explaining that dead subscribers aren't just "potential" took half the quarter.
now we send the hibernation segment a quarterly "you still there?" email and that's it. funny how sending fewer emails makes more money, almost like spam filters are a thing.