Top 7 Tools and Solutions For Email Marketing That Support Deep Customer Segmentation, According To Our Research

Fact Checked by: Alex Rose

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Our Research Process

As the Aimondo Pricing Academy prepared a webinar on email marketing, we delved deeper into this topic. Our customers typically use Aimondo's analytics solutions to create more relevant and precise customer segments for various purposes, primarily for promotions, as we're a pricing platform after all.

We understand our customers’ process: they upload historical sales data, add real-time market intelligence data, and our platform generates customer segments with personalised promotion recommendations (at the product, category, or promotion depth level). Then, the Pricing Manager relays these insights to the marketing department to devise personalised email campaigns. This process is time-consuming, and some information may be lost in translation, as none of Aimondo’s customers has ever requested integration with their email marketing tool (which we would have readily developed).

At this juncture, we began to explore whether there are native ways within existing email marketing tools to build relevant customer segments and manage promotional or product offer campaigns.

We tested multiple platforms, analysing capabilities interconnected with an email solution’s ability to perform deep and accurate customer segmentation:

•               Native Segmentation Options: Are they based on subscriber actions, such as opens and clicks, or anything more in-depth?

•               Personalisation Scope: Is it limited to first and last name variables, or does it allow for the creation of dynamic content (e.g., product prices)?

•               Segmentation Tools: Are there just custom tags, or are more advanced options available?

•               Integration Capabilities: Since segmentation should be based on both historical and real-time customer behaviour, and historical data is stored in CRM systems, native, easy integration with CRM is vital for analysing and building customer segments.

•               Built-in Functionality: To track real-time customer behaviour and deliver dynamically updated content. This represents a professional, top-level type of segmentation, and we did not expect to find it in all the tools.

We enlisted a dedicated team of marketing professionals from various sectors—B2B, B2C, eCommerce—to test and offer recommendations based on their personal experience with the platforms.

Platforms Tested‍

• MailerLite,
• EmailOctopus,
• SendGrid,
• MailChimp,
• ConvertKit,
• ActiveCampaign,
• HubSpot Emailing,
• Klaviyo,
• Marketo,
• GetResponse,
• Constant Contact,
• Campaign Monitor,
• Sendinblue.

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Our Top Picks

1.    ActiveCampaign — Best In Class For SaaS In Terms Of Segmentation & Data Exchange

ActiveCampaign is by far the most suitable email marketing solution if you want to translate customer segmentation into dynamic content. Are you looking to deliver segment-specific promotions to a very specific customer profile (based on their behaviour, purchase history, demographics, or other characteristics)? At the same time, do you want everyone else to see different content? ActiveCampaign is the best tool for this task.

Aiming to deliver personalised recommendations based on lookalike buyer reviews? Again, ActiveCampaign is your go-to tool.

Dynamic content in ActiveCampaign

The best part is that every block in your email can become dynamic and can be linked to any custom segment you have created using Conditional content feature.

In-app segmentation capabilities

ActiveCampaign also boasts an absolutely great and very flexible Segment Builder. It enables the creation of custom segments based on so-called “global data” (data collected by ActiveCampaign itself), including:

•               Contact details

•               Any number of custom fields

•               Interactions with the email (open, forward, social share, clicks, replies)

•               Site and event data (to let the tool collect this data, you have to install ActiveCampaign’s tracking code)

•               Deals (deal stage, status)

•               Attribution (medium, source, campaign, term)

ActiveCampaign Integrations

ActiveCampaign allows numerous native integrations with a variety of CRMs. You can easily connect it to Salesforce, amoCRM, Chime, Contactually, Flexie, Microsoft Dynamics, and many more. If there’s no native integration available, you can use n8n — a special “Zapier for ActiveCampaign,” a connector service that helps you transform JSON requests into no-code blocks and build custom scenarios for data exchange.

Take-away

All in all, ActiveCampaign appears to be the best option if you're in SaaS business and serious about advancing your customer segmentation and highly personalised content, including personalised promo offers.

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2. Klaviyo — The Best For Deep and Detailed Segmentation in Ecommerce

Klaviyo is hands-down the best email service for e-commerce, especially because it offers many pre-built rules to segment customers in ways that are inherently suited to e-commerce.

In-app segmentation capabilities

For instance, you don’t need to devise workarounds to create a “holiday shoppers” segment. Simply choose customers who made purchases around the holiday season last year, and remind them of the items they showed interest in.

Or consider the cross-sell segment, which captures a group of people who purchased a specific item but haven't bought one or more related items they might also be interested in. For example, you might want to send an email to someone who has purchased summer shorts at least once but hasn't bought tank tops yet — and then send them a personalised offer for tank tops.

The best part of Klaviyo, of course, is its predictive analytics module.

This feature allows you to predict multiple aspects:

• from a customer's gender (to send out gender-related product offers)
• to the probable date of the next purchase.

The most utilised prediction is the risk of churn (based on their number and frequency of orders), which enables sending personalised email communications to customers most likely to churn. Another widely used prediction is the probable CLV (or the amount of money a customer is likely to spend with you), enabling more compelling offers for high CLV customers and less discounting for those unlikely to remain loyal for long.

This is what our customers often calculate using the Aimondo Flex platform. Klaviyo allows for native calculations using click-through data, email engagement data, and, of course, data extracted from your CRM.

Klaviyo's Integrations

Klaviyo provides native integrations with all major e-commerce customer data sources: Shopify, BigCommerce, OpenCart, Shopware, Adobe Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and more. Integrations with CRMs are also available: HubSpot, Pipedrive, Copper, and others. Once the connection is established (no technical skills needed), data synchronizes between your e-commerce platform or CRM and Klaviyo in real time. However, the scope of data exchange differs across platforms. For example, nearly all customer data is synced between Shopify and Klaviyo. For Salesforce, however, only one update is sent from the CRM to Klaviyo — when a person becomes a lead. Other profile updates are not synchronized natively. You can manage synchronization using Zapier or Make. Additionally, if you're familiar with API, you can build virtually any synchronization between Klaviyo and customer data storing platforms.

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3. Mailchimp – Perfect Road For SME. But One way

Mailchimp, arguably the market leader in email marketing, offers not just great email templates and a flexible editor but also pretty good segmentation features based on customer behaviour, preferences, and previous interactions.

In-app segmentation capabilities

For example, you can utilise Mailchimp's pre-built segment templates that help you group customers into segments based on their:

•               Status (old/new)

•               Engagement rate (high engagement/low engagement)

•               Customers expected to have the highest CLV

•               Really warm leads (high level of engagement, moved far along your funnel)

•               Recent customers (those who made a purchase not long ago)

•               First-time customers (people who have made a purchase for the first time)

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You can use these templates or build your own segments, using filtering options and add subscribers who fit one or several criteria. In Mailchimp, you can choose the following filters:

•               Tags

•               Belonging to a group

•               Contact details (email, name, email client, language, predicted age, predicted location, predicted gender, role or department, submission time). Keep in mind that predictions work more or less accurately for the US-based audience but for the EU market, it will be more a miss than a hit

•               Source (landing page URL, landing page variant)

•               Date acquired

•               Subscriber activity (engagement, interaction).

Using pre-built segments, you can create email dripping sequences (called journeys in Mailchimp) and email campaigns. A certain type of segmentation based on user behaviour is also available while creating a journey (if scenarios, waiting for a trigger, etc.)

Dynamic content in Mailchimp

Mailchimp has a dynamic content option that you might use to show deeply personalised messages. However, it’s connected not to your segments but to the audience’s MERGE TAGs, which makes the whole point somewhat less useful.

Mailchimp Integrations

Mailchimp is one of the strongest in this respect. Though the product is actually positioned as a simplified version of a CRM itself, Mailchimp’s developers have been working hard on building custom integrations with all possible data sources. It has integrations with Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Shopify (where you’d store customers’ historical purchase data instead of in a CRM), as well as data exchange with small and niche products like OnePage CRM, Less Annoying CRM, Neon CRM, Beacon CRM. The problem, however, is that almost all integrations between CRMs and Mailchimp are one-directional: that is, you can send customer data to Mailchimp, but you can’t update customer profiles in your CRM based on users' interactions with the email.

Take-away

All in all, we rate Mailchimp as not the best in deep segmentation, however, if you’re just starting on this journey it might be a good point. It’s simple, intuitive to use, and allows data exchange (though in one direction) with pretty much anything.

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4. HubSpot – Decent Analytics With Limited Emailing Capabilities

Despite multiple integrations, HubSpot has native emailing capabilities and prefers users to utilise these instead of setting up complex API exchanges.

Native segmentation capabilities

The strength of HubSpot lies in the nature of the product. As a platform that hosts the entire history of your interactions with every single lead, prospect, or customer, it enables you to build custom segments based on any criteria you choose. The only requirement is that these criteria must correlate with the fields in your CRM:

•               Behaviour (from the number of pages read in your online guide to the size of the previous purchase)

•               Demographics (location, age, gender, income, etc.)

•               Intensity of the latest engagement

Whatever criteria you select, you can easily convert your HubSpot lists into segments.

HubSpot Integrations

HubSpot offers native email templates, but for truly exceptional results in terms of UI, integration with dedicated mailing tools is needed. There are not many options to choose from. They include MailChimp (this is one of the rare cases where the one-way direction rule for MailChimp does not apply), Campaign Monitor, Stripo, and BEE Free. Other emailing tools with which HubSpot supports native integration deal with open rate analytics, AI-generated content, and email validation.

Take-away

So, if you are a user of the HubSpot platform, it makes total sense to leverage its data grouping tools and set up integration with one of the email service providers to create better-looking emails.

5. Campaign Monitor — Great Emailing Service With Deep Segmentation for HubSpot. Everything Else Needs A Small Work-Around

Like ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor allows the creation of unlimited custom segments within subscriber lists.

In-app segmentation capabilities

It provides pre-built fields for segmentation, such as:

• Location,
• Campaign activity,
• Journey activity (where email sequences are termed "journeys" like in Mailchimp),
• Engagement level (active, engaged, unengaged, zombies, dormant, ghosts).
• Additionally, you can create entirely custom fields for filtering segments, like the number of purchases made (either more or less than a certain number, or based on the total value of purchases, etc.) or attribution (converted using a specific channel or source).

You can combine various rules to create the needed segment (e.g., purchased more than X, converted via Google Ads, and lives in London). Campaign Monitor also supports the addition of segment-conditioned dynamic content in emails.

Dynamic content

Dynamic content in Campaign Monitor can include text, image, URL, and button text, covering nearly all options for personalisation.

Campaign Monitor Integrations

This aspect is arguably Campaign Monitor's weakest link. The platform offers limited native integrations for secure and fast data exchange, with the primary available option being the integration with HubSpot. If you use a different CRM, you'll need to construct your own integration using an API or enlist the services of one of the numerous no-code connection providers. For Campaign Monitor, alternatives extend beyond Zapier or Make, with many smaller players thriving in the niche Campaign Monitor environment, facilitating connections to Salesforce, Zoho, or virtually any popular CRM solution. Each integration allows you to map your CRM fields to custom fields in Campaign Monitor and create segments based on data available in your CRM.

This setup is certainly beneficial for Campaign Monitor, as it enlists multiple businesses as partners and delegates the responsibility of customer acquisition to them. However, be prepared to pay an additional fee for another SaaS just to arrange a smooth exchange of your data flows between your source of truth and your emailing platform.

6. Marketo — Perfect For Corporate Environment, Decent Segmentation Options

Marketo is, of course, not just an email marketing platform (similarly to HubSpot), yet emails are a significant part of it. Marketo enables the creation of dynamic content, including text, images, and links, much like other platforms. A major advantage is its ability to create snippets – recurring dynamic content. Utilising snippets simplifies scaling up your marketing communications.

Dynamic content in Marketo

Dynamic content is linked to your custom segments. The range of segments you can create is extensive: up to 100 segments using standard fields such as location, age, gender, deal size, deal stage, interests, etc.

In-app segmentation capabilities

You can generate even more using custom fields and rules.

A unique, fail-safe feature in Marketo, absent in other platforms, is that every segment requires approval. Not by your manager, but by the platform itself, which checks if the rules you're using to create these segments don't contradict each other, aren't mutually exclusive, and if there are any profiles in your database that meet all your conditions. This formal logic in approval means technically that every lead in your database is analysed and assigned to a certain segment. If the system identifies that one lead is assigned to mutually exclusive segments (e.g., high risk of churn and active user), it might indicate an error, prompting you to double-check your rules.

Marketo Integrations

Needless to say, Marketo seamlessly integrates with the Adobe Experience Cloud and, therefore, with Audience Manager, Experience Manager Assets, Target, Analytics, Workfront, Real-Time CDP, and Advertising. This integration alone positions Marketo as a highly powerful tool, allowing you to create segments in the Audience Manager and then transfer data to the email marketing module. It also features native integration with Salesforce, SAP, MS Dynamics — all the "big boys."

There's also a native service facilitating integration between HubSpot and Marketo, offering two-way data synchronisation in real-time between both platforms. Our conclusion is that for performing data analysis to create segments, you'll need to leverage the Adobe Environment or your CRM. However, it’s straightforward to transmit the results of your analysis to Marketo and create relevant segments there, thereby double-checking the accuracy of your rules along the way. Safe and solid, Marketo is excellent for corporate use.

Conclusion

Based on the analysis of the tools and solutions for email marketing that support deep customer segmentation, ActiveCampaign stands out as the best option, particularly for SaaS, B2B and any kind of B2C businesses. It excels in translating customer segmentation into dynamic content, offering highly flexible and detailed segment creation capabilities. ActiveCampaign's Segment Builder allows for the creation of custom segments based on a wide range of data, including contact details, interactions with emails, site and event data, and more. Its ability to deliver personalised recommendations and integrate seamlessly with a variety of CRMs positions ActiveCampaign as the superior choice for businesses serious about leveraging advanced segmentation and personalised content to enhance their email marketing strategies.

For the eCommerce, Klaviyo stands out as the best tool. Klaviyo's strengths lie in its comprehensive segmentation capabilities, which are highly tailored to the needs of e-commerce platforms. It offers many pre-built rules for segmenting customers in ways inherently suited to e-commerce scenarios. Additionally, Klaviyo's predictive analytics module significantly enhances its segmentation capabilities. This feature predicts various customer aspects, from gender for targeted product offers to the probable date of the next purchase, including the risk of churn based on order frequency and predicted Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). This allows for highly personalised email communications to customers most at risk of churning and enables more compelling offers to be made to customers with a high predicted CLV.

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