A Clever Gender Segmentation Technique from ASOS
Jul 29 2009
Nothing frustrates me more than getting sent irrelevant emails from clothing websites. For a store that sells to both men and women, you need gender to provide relevancy. Some stores have the data and don’t use it out of laziness, others don’t ask for the information or don’t have it.
I clicked on a link in a tweet recently that said “my favorite website of the moment” which led me to a clothing site called ASOS. They sell to both men and women and used a great segmentation technique I had never seen before. Instead of having a traditional submit/subscribe button, they had 2 buttons – women & men:
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The best user experiences on the web are simple. This doesn’t take much thought and is perfectly intuitive. If you rely on gender to provide relevancy to increase conversions, this is a great first step. I would give it a try – there is no wrong answer.
My only let down was that I didn’t receive a welcome email after opt-in. This email could have really focused in on the male content and would most likely drive a lot of page views and conversions for ASOS. Maybe it is in the works…
Have you seen other uses of this opt-in technique on the web? Let us know in a comment below.
- Posted by Alex Williams
- @alexcwilliams
- at 10:08 PM
Published in Email Segmentation, Keep It Simple, Opt-In and Opt-Out, Tip Jar
Tags: buttons, email marketing, examples, gender, Opt-in, segmentation, tips

(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)







July 30th, 2009 at 7:46 am
Alex, I agree that is a brilliant use of a simple sign up form to do an important segmentation task!
July 30th, 2009 at 12:50 am
[...] Kreatives Anmeldeformular: Alex Williams hat ein effizientes Newsletter-Anmeldeformular entdeckt, bei dem der Absenden-Knopf im Formular ersetzt wurde durch zwei Knöpfe: Mann & Frau. Die Lösung ist durch Javascript zwar nicht barrierefrei, aber im Ergebnis wird – bei gleichem Aufwand für den User (= E-Mail eingeben + klicken) – ein Merkmal mehr erhoben. http://returnonsubscriber.com/2009/07/29/a-clever-gender-segmentation-technique-from-asos/ [...]
August 2nd, 2009 at 8:22 pm
[...] On Subscriber recently highlighted a clever way of accomplishing this. It’s definitely worth clicking through to see [...]
August 11th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Thanks for sharing. I'll keep this in mind as I grow Hot Salsa Tees.
November 23rd, 2009 at 3:26 pm
I think whenever you subscribes online, definitely you'll get a welcome or a thank you email. I think there something wrong happen, cases like wrong input of email or connection problem. An with regards to the 2 buttons, it is better to have 2 different buttons for shoppers to know that this apparel is only avail for men or maybe for women. Shops usually do this for shoppers to distinguish different clothing.
December 29th, 2009 at 3:22 am
Awesome post!