You don’t need a vast amount of information to start a good relationship with your customers. One the most basic pieces of data you can get from your customers is their gender. Using gender may seem like the most basic segmentation technique for email marketing - two different campaigns, one targeted to women and another to men - but it can have a dramatic impact on your results. Let’s see how you can use the gender of your customers to drive a successful marketing campaign.
Gender-specific, targeted campaigns can often be a quick and proven way to help you to effectively engage your customers. For example, you can send Gift Campaigns ‘For Him’, ‘For Her’ for special days such as Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day; you can create newsletters that are specific to males/females; you can also identify products that are gender-specific and send a campaign targeted to men or women during Christmas season. For such a simple piece of data to collect, the range of options it makes available to you is generous to say the least.
One great example is that of British clothes retailer, FCUK. It sends a different welcome email to its new subscribers depending on whether they’re male or female. You can see in the below that the most obvious change is the image - this may seem very simple, but it makes a difference. What this subtly shows is that they know something about the subscriber and their preferences. However, the image is not the only thing that changes in the email. The ‘Click to shop’ button links to either the male or female category of their online store, demonstrating that clever marketing often starts with the simplest things.
There are risks associated with making assumptions about someone’s gender based on inference (‘they bought a pair of women’s shoes ergo they must be a woman’), but if you adopt a robust approach to capturing this information in the first place, there are plenty of ways that you can use it to communicate more effectively right away.
