How To Segment Your Email List For Ecommerce in 2026

0:00Sending the exact same email to everyone on your email list is quietly killing your sales. Your email list is the single best money maker you've got, but only if you group your people the right way. And most ecom brands, they group them wrong, or they don't group them at all. So, in this video, I'm going to show you the exact handful of groups you actually need in 2026 to get results like these. There's also one split in here that almost nobody does, and it's the one that turns your list from a vanity number into real customers, and I'll get to that. But first, a quick intro. My name is Emil, and I run an

0:37email and SMS marketing agency for e-commerce brands called Magicianly. And we've worked with more than 150 ecom brands and generated them over 300 million in sales. And we have a stack of five-star prospot reviews from the ecom founders we've done it for. So, this is the exact way we set this up inside real

0:55Clavio accounts. So, let's get into it. First, let's talk about why sending one email to your whole list is so much more dangerous in 2026 than it used to be. Because the inbox has changed. It used to be pretty simple. So, send to everyone and some people open, some people don't. No big deal. But that's not how it works anymore because Gmail, Apple Mail, and all the other big inbox providers, they now decide where your email lands based on how people engage with it. So, they are watching the opens, the clicks, the deletes, how fast people swipe you away. And here's the part that gets the ecom rats because

1:32they don't judge each email on its own. They judge your whole sender reputation. So, picture what happens when you blast your entire email list. So, you've got a chunk of people who are into your brand, but a much bigger chunk who signed up 8 months ago for a discount and forgot you exist and never bought from you. So, when you send to all of them, that second group ignores you and the inbox read as, "Okay, nobody wants this brand's email." And then it starts burring you for everybody, including the people who do love you. So, you didn't just waste a sand on that weight, but

2:09you drag down your own best customers. And that's why segmentation in 2026 isn't just a nice to have for slightly better conversions, but it's really a mandatory thing to be successful in email marketing and with growing your brand as a whole. So, every time you send to people who don't care, you are training the inbox to simply hide you from the people who do like you. So, the entire game comes down to this. mostly talk to the people who are paying attention and only carefully reach out to the ones who aren't. Quick warning before we go to the next part. So, I've got a free email marketing course on my

2:44website that breaks down everything about email marketing for ecom brands in way more detail. So, the segments, the flows, all of it, and there's no filler in it. So, the link is in the description below if you want it. And now, let's get back to the video. Now, let's talk about who you should be sending emails to. So in other words, the segments to use in your play account. So the first and most important group that you will use for almost every email campaign that you will ever send your engaged segment. And this is just everyone who's shown a sign of life recently. So whether they've opened an

3:17email from you, they clicked in an email from you, or they were on your website in the last little while, this will be your default segment for your email campaigns. So, if you do nothing else from this video, send your campaigns to your engaged people. So, instead of your whole email list, and I can promise you, your numbers will jump. But before you leave, here's the part that most e-commerce miss. And it's the 2026 way to think about because the time window is not just a fixed setting. It's really like a dial. So, when your deliverability is strong and your opens

3:49are healthy, you can open it up wide. send to everyone engaged in the last 90 days or even 120 days and you can reach some more people. But on the other side, when your deliverability is struggling and your emails are landing in the spam box, you want to tighten the engage segment down to 30 days or 60 days, just your most active people and you want to rebuild your sending reputation and then later you can open it back up again. So, you're not just picking one number forever, like your 90 days engage segment, but you're really turning the dial based on how healthy your sending is that specific week or month. Another

4:24thing that we like to do is send to different engaged segments throughout the week. So, let's say that you send five email campaigns per week. In that case, we make sure that the most engaged group gets all five emails throughout the week and a less engaged group, so for example, 120 days engaged, only gets two or three emails that week. And by applying this strategy, we see a massive improvement in overall results. So revenue-wise, and a much lower unsubscribe rate by adopting this strategy. Now, I'm not going to walk you through every click of building this segment in Claio here because I already made a full step-by-step video on

5:00exactly how to build your engage segments and also other important segments inside Claio. So if you want me to show you how to set up every single segment one for one with the exact conditions, the exact exclusions, all of it, you can watch that video via the link in the description below. So in this video, I just want to stay on the strategy, the groups that you need, and how to actually use them. So the thing to take away here is the concept. So one engage base and you widen or tighten it depending on your current email deliverability status. Now, here's the split that I promised you at the start

5:32of this video and the one that almost nobody does. It's the one that really prints money for our own clients. So, inside your engage base, you want to split the people by where they've bought from you or not. So, here's why this matters so much. So, if you look at where your campaign revenue comes from, something like 60 to 80% of it comes from people who already bought from you at least once. So, your existing

5:55customers, they carry the whole thing. But the job actual growth lever is turning the people who are engaged but have never bought from you into firsttime customers. So a subscriber who never buys from you is just an email subscriber and yeah just a number. But a customer is the thing that pays your bills. So what you want to do is make sure that this engaged email subscriber will do this first purchase. So here's the move. You want to take your email campaign and you want to send it in two different ways. Basically the same email, so the same design, but with one slight difference. So to the people who

6:29have never bought from your brand, you want to include your welcome discount. So the same first order offer that you put in your signup form and in your welcome series block. So you're giving them the notch to finally pull the trigger. And to the people who have already bought from you, then of course you're just going to send the exact same email, but with no email at all because yeah, they don't need it. And you protect your margin because you'll make that back on their repeat orders. So to recap, to your non- buyers, you want to basically remind them of the welcome discount that you originally gave them

6:58in the welcome series, maybe even like months ago. But it does work with converting your email subscribers into firsttime buyers. And don't panic about giving away that first order discount to non- buyers because the whole point is to move someone from never bought into bot. And once they're a customer, that's where the real lifetime value lives. So you're not bleeding margin. You already gave the discount anyway to them. You're just buying a customer at the cheapest that you'll ever get them. And you want to give them the opportunity to have that first experience, that real experience with your brand by doing that first purchase. And of course, you can

7:32take the same idea into your sales event. So, for example, when you run a promo, you can give your non- buyers a little extra on top to finally tip them over. And don't hand that extra to your existing customers who are going to buy from you anyway. So, it's the same principle, but spend your discount where it actually change a decision. Now this next thing will save you from the biggest segmentation trap there is and that's layering. So people hear segmentation and they go build out 40 tiny segments. So for example, men who like green or people in Texas who opened on a Sunday and each segment has maybe

8:05300 people in it and then they wonder why their email revenue feels flat. So slicing your email list into confetti doesn't make you more money. It just makes more work and just starves every scent of volume. I don't know, it sounds sexy to come up with all these micro segments and to really target and pinpoint the exact segment you want to reach, but in practice, and again, we've tested it out for all of our clients in the last 7 years, in the end, the most important segment of your email list is your engage segment. So, what you want to do instead is that you want to keep

8:35your one engaged base and layer a single behavior on top of it when the campaign calls for it. So, for example, if you're launching a new flavor or a new product, you want, of course, send it to your engage base. Plus, anyone who has viewed that specific product or that category recently. So, now the people most likely to care are guaranteed to get it. And you still kept your volume up. Or, for example, if you're running a big sale, you want to send it again to your engaged base and layer your laps customers on top of it. So, the ones who bought before but have gone quiet in the

9:07last couple of months. Because a real sale is a good reason to really poke them. Another idea, if you're doing an early access drop, that's your VIPs layered on the people who've bought four or five times. They're getting the first dips before everyone else. So, you can probably see the pattern, right? So, you're not just building a permanent maze of micro segments. You've just got one strong base. So, your engage segments, and you snap one relevant layer on top of that specific scent. So, relevance without killing your reach, which I see go wrong all the time. And that's the whole art of it. So step back

9:38and look at what you've got now. So one engage base that you send to most of the time with the window as a dial for your email delivering a buyer versus non- buyer split. So you're spending your discounts where they actually change a decision and converting subscribers into customers. And you add on top of that a couple of behavioral layers that you snap on for specific sense. So that's really the whole system. So again, you don't need 40 micro segments. You need the handful that really moves the needle for your ecom business. You want to measure it the right way. So you don't just want to stare at your operates, but

10:13you want to watch how many non- buyers you're turning into firsttime buyers, and you want to watch your repeat purchase rate. And that's what really tells you if your segmentation is really building a business and not just making a clay dashboard look pretty. Now, here's the thing. Even once you've got your email list grouped perfectly, you still have to know what to send to those people to make them buy from you. The groups are the targeting, but the emails are like the bullets and one without the other doesn't do much really. So, if you want my team to handle all of this for you, so the segmentation, the campaigns,

10:45the flows, all of it. So, you can scale your ecom store to 8 figures and beyond, there's a link below in the description to book a free call with me. And if you're not ready for a call yet, but you want to go deeper, watch this next video where I break down why e-commerce emails end up in the spam folder in the first place. Because everything we just talked about falls apart if your emails are landing in spam. So after watching that video, you'll know exactly how to fix it. I'll see you over