Segmenting your database correctly will help you to get much better marketing and sales results from it. So once you have set up your contact database (ideally in a CRM system) and have selected all the properties that you want to collect, it's time to segment your leads based on those properties. Segmenting basically means grouping your contacts into lists that are relevant to your marketing and sales team.
Why Do You Need to Segment Your Contacts?
One of the most common ways that you'll be using your contact database is to email them. Most people who unsubscribe from emails, do so because the content is no longer relevant to them.
Segmenting is all about understanding and grouping your customer database, so that you can keep your communications with them relevant to increase engagement and avoid being considered as spam.
Understanding what your customers are interested in and grouping them by these interests will help you to communicate more effectively. If you target your email to a specific customer profile, via a database segment of that audience, with great content that is important to them, your email will be rewarded with a higher open rate and many more click-throughs.
In turn, this will increase your email sender reputation, as your contacts grow to expect the great content you are sending that is targeted to their needs.
Ways To Segment Your Database
As with most areas of marketing, it is best to start with your objectives. Think about what you are looking to achieve and importantly what your prospects are looking to achieve.
You can segment based on any field of data that you are collecting in your database, which means there are many ways that you can segment your data. Here's a few ideas on how you could segment your data:
• Prospects who have been actively engaged in the last X number of days
• By level of sales-readiness or lead score
• Prospects who've entered a sales process but did not close
• Customers of specific products or services
• Based on any property or combination of properties collected for landing pages
• Another important segment is a suppression list of contacts that shouldn't receive a campaign or any emails from you, if they have opted out
You can segment your database as much as it works for you. It is common practice to segment your database differently for specific marketing campaigns. Contacts can be in various segments at the same time. What matters is that you’re sending the right information to the right people at the right time.
How to Segment Your Contacts
The most common way to segment your contacts is through lists - these may have different names depending on the CRM or marketing system that you use.
Ideally you'll be using a system that will allow you to create smart dynamic lists that update automatically as the properties of your contacts update. Marketing systems like Hubspot do a great job of this. For example as properties change, either from a lead's engagement with your website, fields they have completed on landing pages, or CRM changes made by your sales team, smart lists automatically update.
If you are not using a system that automatically updates, you have to run manual filters at specific intervals or ask a developer to create an automated task to update your filters at specific intervals.
Here's some examples of how segmenting with smart lists can make your marketing more effective:
• Send automated nurturing emails to qualified leads to encourage them to take the next step in your sales process, for example scheduling a demo or initial consultation.
• If a lead hasn't been active on your website in over 30 days, you can trigger emails with educational content encouraging them to return and engage. When they do return, you'd then set up the system to turn off these automated emails.
Get Started Today – Identify and Build Segments To Improve Your Marketing
- Define your segmentation objectives by taking a look at your marketing goals. For example if you want to increase leads for a particular product or service, you can then identify a segment of your contacts that would be appropriate for this product or service.
- Identify the criteria that will define this segment and then set it up in your marketing system.
- When you have created the segment, you'll need to check and test it to make sure that it has been created correctly. If it is a smart list, you'll want to test that it is updating correctly.
- As soon as you are confident with the segment you can start your marketing. Remember to set some targets for the activity, so that you test performance against your expectations.