It’s impossible to go through a mail marketing class or even a basic marketing training video without learning about audience segmentation. From Mailchimp to HubSpot, every marketing and training platform on the Internet stresses the importance of segmenting email audiences to make our communication more effective and personal.
Audience segmentation is a marketing strategy that identifies subgroups within the target audience to deliver more tailored messaging and build stronger connections.
Mailchimp
How to build segments
Segmentation can be based on additional information about your users kept in your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or email platform database. The information can be stored in dedicated fields, e.g., DoB, or as tags, e.g., “Tradeshow Visitor”. The main types of segmentations are:
- Demographics: These segments are based on data such as age, gender, income level, education, location, and job title.
- Psychographics: These segments are based on insights from users’ interactions with your brand, including values, interests, personality traits, lifestyle choices, and pain points.
- Behaviorals: These segments are based on purchasing history and habits, brand loyalty, and how they interact with your brand.
- Firmographic: This segmentation is used primarily by B2B brands. It divides your audience into segments based on the company size, industry, or revenue.
The costs of segmentation
Collecting information about your users is not free. All your brand’s touchpoints must be configured to collect and update user data. For example, a lead generation form must include additional fields to support future segmentation, but those non-essential fields can increase friction and reduce the form’s conversion rate. Luckily, a significant amount of information is already available in your information system, and it’s only a matter of integrating and exchanging data to make it available in the CRM for segmentation. For example, if you are running an e-commerce business, the list of products a user has purchased is already stored in your database, and preparing your CRM for segmentation is simply connecting your e-commerce database to your CRM, which doesn’t require any additional input from your customers.
Large companies with extensive customer and contact lists usually have the resources to segment their contacts and leverage those segments for more effective communication. Small companies usually don’t have the resources to create specific messages for each segment or to integrate their contact list and information systems to enable segmentation.
Regardless of your company or brand size, if your CRM has enough data, the benefits of segmenting your audience will become self-evident. In my experience, it’s worth the effort.
Benefits of segmentation
Segmentation is not only about dividing your contacts into clusters of users who share certain features or traits, but it’s also about crafting specific communications for each cluster or segment.
All that work can bring some benefit to your communication:
- You can tailor your message to better resonate with your users and customers in each segment.
- You can address specific needs, improve your conversion rate, and send messages that are relevant to each segment.
- Overall, more personalized, relevant communication will help you build a resilient and lasting relationship between your brand and your customers, moving you closer to the goal of all marketers: customer loyalty.
- Finally, better and more relevant communication can visibly accelerate your sales cycle. With a visible impact on your ROI.
Audience segmentation enhances marketing effectiveness by dividing a broad customer base into distinct groups, enabling personalized messaging, higher conversion rates, and greater ROI.
Vypr
The risk of everlapping segments
Segmentation is not an exact science. It takes experience and a trial-and-error approach to get to the best segmentation strategy for your brand. A strategy based on your marketing goals and on the quality, reliability, and comprehensiveness of the data in your CRM. There is always the risk of defining overlapping segments, where a user can belong to more than one segment. This can lead to a few issues in your communication:
- Message Fatigue: Targeting the same users with multiple campaigns leads to disengagement.
- Conflicting Messages: A user might receive two offers that match two different segments, leading to confusion.
- Operational Inefficiency: If the overlap is significant, it can make it difficult to measure which campaign actually drove a conversion.
In some cases, the overlap can create meaningful friction in the experience. A customer might buy an item at full price but remain in your prospect nurture stream, resulting in a welcome discount offer for the same item.
Mailchimp
Case Study: what not to do. The Bosch example
Bosch is one of the largest, if not the largest, manufacturers of electric motors for e-bikes. Based on recent market data and Bosch’s production capacity, it is estimated that Bosch sells between 2.5 million and 3.5 million e-bike drive units per year. Each engine is connected to an app that, after a user’s login, allows the user to fine-tune the engine and to track all the cycling activities. This clearly feeds the Bosch CRM with contact emails for almost all its customers, as well as for customers of bike manufacturers that install Bosch engines.
Not all e-bikes are the same, even when they use the same Bosch electric motor. At a minimum, we can identify 4 types of bikes: Urban and cargo bikes, road bikes, gravel bikes, and Mountain Bikes. Bosch knows which bike you are riding, even if a third party assembled it, because each bike category requires a different factory setting for the engine. This is a perfect case study in email segmentation. Bosch can send gravel recommendations to gravel bike users and MTB suggestions to MTB bikers?
Well, in reality, Bosch, for reasons unknown to me, isn’t segmenting their electric motor audience and is sending the same message to everybody. I’m the happy owner of a Cube Gravel eBike with a Bosch engine, the Drive Unit Performance SX Cruise. Every month, I get an email from Bosch with some news about their products, and I always notice how off-target their messages are. It’s almost irritating to see how lazy their marketing is.
I admit, there can be reasons for Bosch to skip the segmentation. Those are the possible reasons for their decision to send all their users the same message regarding the bike they ride:
- The “Halo” marketing Strategy: Bosch treats Electric MTBs as their Halo category. In marketing, a halo category is the most extreme, exciting version of a product used to build brand prestige, even if most customers don’t use it. They assume that even if I bought a gravel bike, I’m a “performance” rider who respects and is interested in the high-tech updates they give to mountain bikers. Not true in my case.
- The Integration Issue: Despite knowing exactly what kind of bike I ride, Bosch’s marketing team and engineering team don’t “talk” to each other perfectly. This lack of integration results in an underutilization of their CRM data. Given the size and the budget available to the Bosch marketing department, I don’t consider this a good reason.
- Upselling Strategy: There might be a subtle strategy at play. By showing me “useless” MTB advanced features, they are planting seeds for a future upsell. They want me to think, “When I eventually get a second bike or replace this one, I will stick with Bosch engines because their MTB tech is so advanced.”
Although some business analysts praise Bosch for its audience segmentation strategy, I believe sloppiness is the main reason Bosch hasn’t segmented its email audience for electric motors. They are large enough and have all the information required to successfully segment their emails by bike type. Still, they choose the “shotgun approach” because it’s cheaper and they, wrongly, hope it will keep the “Bosch is the leader in tech” narrative front-and-center for everyone, regardless of what they actually ride.
In my professional opinion, the primary reason Bosch hasn’t segmented its email audience is simple carelessness. Despite having both the scale and the data needed to tailor emails by bike type, they have chosen not to do so.
Franco Folini
What are the costs of the missing segmentation for Bosch?
- Brand Dilution and “Message Fatigue”: The most immediate risk is irrelevance. When a user like me receives three emails in a row about “Extreme Rock Crawling Features” that their bike cannot physically perform, they stop opening them. Then, when Bosch actually releases a feature relevant to me and other gravel riders (e.g., a new “Gravel Sprint” mode), we are likely to ignore it because we’ve been trained to view their emails as “MTB noise.”
- Eroding the “Premium” Experience: Bosch positions itself as a premium, high-tech partner to luxury bike brands such as Cube, Specialized, and Canyon. High-end consumers expect a personalized experience. If you spend $3,000+ on a carbon gravel bike, receiving “sloppy” marketing makes the brand feel like a massive, impersonal utility company rather than a refined tech partner.
- Misleading Customers: By promoting features that are unavailable on the recipient’s bike, Bosch creates confusion that leads to “customer support friction.” When I receive and read a newsletter announcing a new feature for my bike motor, I assume it’s talking to me. I might spend 20 minutes trying to find the feature in my Bosch App called Flow, to realize my motor doesn’t support it. It can be really frustrating. This can generate unnecessary support tickets and angry forum posts, which cost Bosch money to manage and can impact their brand.
- Missed Opportunity Cost: Bosch sits on a goldmine of data. They know your average cadence, how often you ride, and likely your general geographic area. By ignoring this critical data in their marketing efforts, Bosch misses valuable opportunities to cross-sell relevant products and services to their customers. Also, gravel riding is a specific subculture. By failing to speak the “language” of gravel, Bosch allows competitors like SRAM to claim the sport’s emotional territory.
- Competitive Vulnerability: The “Lightweight E-bike” market, the category my SX motor falls into, is the most contested segment right now. Bosch competitors focus heavily on the “natural” and “sleek” cycling experience provided by those electric motors. If a Bosch competitor sends beautifully curated emails about “the silence of the ride” and “the beauty of the gravel path,” while Bosch sends an email about “The Next MTB Key Feature,” the users might feel that Bosch “doesn’t get” them. This makes it easier for the user to switch brands when they buy their next bike.
- Privacy & Trust Skepticism: We, the users, are increasingly sensitive about data. If, as a user, I know that Bosch has my bike data, which the Flow app clearly shows, but the Bosch marketing department isn’t using it, it creates a “creepy vs. incompetent” paradox. I might think: “If they are tracking my rides but can’t even get my bike category right in an email, how well are they actually managing my data security?“
Other Mistakes by Bosch Marketing
This is not my first post about Bosch’s marketing. I’ve previously highlighted some of their mistakes. I’m not obsessed with Bosch; rather, it seems their marketing is fixated on me, as I receive numerous emails without the level of care I would expect from such a large and resourceful corporation.
In 2025, I wrote an article titled “Localization Mistakes Can Be Very Expensive!” exposing Bosch’s poor email localization process. They were sending me emails in English, the language I selected for our interactions, but the links in their newsletter pointed to articles in German. Not the end of the world. We all know that Google can translate a web page on the fly. But this is not the level of attention to detail we would expect from a marketing department at a large corporation that likely occupies one or two entire buildings, with plenty of resources and a large budget.
This communication does not meet the level of attention to detail we expect from the marketing department of a large corporation like Bosch which likely has access to plenty of resources and a large budget.
Franco Folini
