In June of 2024, I presented at Email Innovations World alongside Paul Shriner (AudiencePoint) on emotional loyalty in email. At the time, I didn’t realize just how deeply personal that topic would become for me only a few months later, when fires swept through Los Angeles.
To provide some context, I grew up in Pacific Palisades. My family moved there in 1979, when it still felt like a small town in a large city. On the night of January 7, my family home burned down. However, this isn’t a blog about loss or even the fires themselves—it’s about segmentation and how, when done thoughtfully, segmentation is one of the most powerful expressions of empathy in our work as marketers.
When I think about segmentation, here are the first segments that come to mind:
- • Buyers vs. prospects
- • First-time customers vs. loyal customers
- • Unengaged subscribers
- • New to list
Yes, all of these are important segments—but notice how location wasn’t on my list? Interestingly, I work with many restaurants, and often, one of the most essential segments is location. Yet, when I mentally run through the most crucial segmentation strategies, location doesn’t always make my list. And it should—especially when it comes to emotional loyalty in email.
Let me set the stage for why location is essential…
Along with losing our family home, my husband and I had to evacuate my parents to our neighborhood—only to find ourselves packing and evacuating again less than 12 hours later. I found myself sitting in a hotel lobby, juggling insurance calls, monitoring news updates, and trying to focus on work.
But I couldn’t ignore the relentless pinging of my phone—message after message, email after email. Yes, many were from friends and family checking in, but an alarming number were from brands. Brands I love. Brands I’m loyal to.
Normally, I don’t think much about all the marketing messages I receive via SMS and email. I actually enjoy them, often using them as a distraction—and yes, I often shop because of them.
But here I was, less than 24 hours after our evacuation, staring at subject lines about a new lipstick launch or a flash sale on sweaters. And while I probably did need a new lipstick, that was hardly on my mind.
So in the annoyance of the constant pinging on my phone, I hit “unsubscribe” and “STOP” on every single SMS and email that came through, even from brands I’ve shopped with for years. While doing this, I saw a conversation happening in a networking chat. Someone asked, “Are any brands suppressing sends to the LA area because of the fires?” Some felt Los Angeles should be suppressed. Others believed the city was too large for that type of segmentation.
At the time of that conversation, it really did feel like all of Los Angeles was burning.
That’s when it clicked: our industry plays a much more significant role in shaping how people experience the world around them—especially during moments of crisis. As email marketers, we bear the responsibility for a brand’s voice in both good and devastating times. Segmentation isn’t merely a tactic for better engagement; it’s a tool for demonstrating empathy—recognizing that sometimes, the most meaningful message is no message at all.
So, let’s ask the hard questions:
- • Did these brands know I live in Los Angeles? Yes, they did, or they should have, based on location and shipping.
- • Did they know my family’s home burned down? No, I don’t expect that type of personalization.
- • Did they know I was in a mandatory evacuation zone? Yes. My condo was in a mandatory evacuation zone, and my shipping address—where 90% of my online purchases were mailed—was in Pacific Palisades, and like my family home, it was gone.
The point is that we have the data and tools to ensure segmentation demonstrates empathy. The question is: do we possess operational empathy? Meaning are our operations set up to react quickly? I think back to some of the emails I received a day or two into the Covid lockdown which weren’t aligned with the current situation. Empathy isn’t just reflected in the copy you write—it’s about who you choose to engage with when you choose to communicate and, sometimes, when you choose to stay silent.
Now that I can look back, I do regret (and these brands should, too) that I unsubscribed because the chances of resubscribing to each of those brands is highly unlikely. These brands lost me as an engaged subscriber and possibly a customer since they won’t be in my inbox.
So here is my advice for using segmentation to express empathy in situations
- Suppress impacted areas for the first 24–48 hours. Depending on the magnitude of the event, this pause can go a long way, and it gives you time to assess what you, as a brand, will do in these circumstances. It also shows you are paying attention to the world around you. The volume of emails I received about the fires and what needed to be done for safety was overwhelming. It was the only thing I could focus on.
- Use the tools available in your ESP. Most ESPs allow for location-based targeting. I understand it's not perfect and can sometimes contain errors—but it is worth using.
- Get to know your subscribers. Preference centers are a great way to gather location data. Outside of disasters, they help ensure that you’re sending relevant, location-specific messages. For example, a fast-casual restaurant I love has locations across the state. But if I’ve only ever dined at their Southern California locations, do I really need updates about new openings in Northern California? Probably not.
- Offer the option to opt down temporarily. We see this often around Mother’s Day and Father’s Day—so why not apply it more broadly? If brands had said something like, “LA, we’re here for you, but we know now might not be the right time,” and offered me a temporary opt-out, I might not have hit unsubscribe.
- Leverage segmentation for recovery, too. Many brands later offered discounts for those affected by the fires. These began showing up around 72 hours after the initial crisis, meaning they did have the targeting in place. So, the issue wasn’t whether they had location data—it was when and how they chose to use it. Maybe it’s too bad I’d already unsubscribed.
As marketers, we don’t get to control the moments in someone’s life in which our messages arrive, but we do control how thoughtful we are with our timing, targeting, and tone. When crisis strikes, segmentation becomes more than a marketing tool—it becomes a human one. It’s how we show people we’re paying attention, care, and sometimes we know the right thing to say is nothing at all.
Photo by Guido Jansen on Unsplash