As an online marketer one of your goals is to get leads into your business. This can be achieved in various ways including building a list which is one of the easiest methods of lead generation. Once you have started building a list you should consider segmenting your list. Your leads have subscribed because you are giving away a general ebook, audio or video on a particular topic. Your next goal is to break down this list into more specialized segments.
Related article: Inbound Marketing Tip: Finding Sales Leads the Right Way
This is important for marketers as it allows you to run targeted campaigns to your leads. This helps increase your open rates and improve your sales.
Which emails do you look at?
People enjoy receiving emails that are targeted to their likes. What would you prefer, a generic type of email or one that addresses a specific interest or concern that you have? The second one is classified as a targeted one.
There are various tools that you can use to segment your list. If you use an auto responder service you can segment your list directly from inside your account. Aweber for example has a complete tutorial on how to do this.
One of the things in their tutorial Start Segmenting: 3 Easy Steps is to create different landing pages so you can track where the leads come from. The second is to track subscribers as they come in (trust me you don’t want to wait until you have a few dozen). Third will come later. It’s where you target your subscribers after you have segmented them.
How do I segment thee, let me count the ways.
Related article: Why Lead Intelligence Will Make You Question Everything
Segmenting Your List by Category
Some of the most popular ways of segmenting your leads is by category including by:
- Geographical location
- Purchase History
- Cart Abandonment
- Interest or Subject
- Age/Gender
- Industry
You can find 27 more ways to segment your list at Hubspot’s Corey Eridon’s 27 Ways to Slice & Dice Your Email List (don’t you like that title?). Here’s one idea that I found interesting:
Usage
Whatever it is you offer, there are some customers who you could consider power "users." These are the ones that totally get how to navigate your website, use every feature in your software, and make the most of their relationships with your service providers. Then there are the rest of us. Segment out the power users and the strugglers, frequent users, and infrequent users; then send email content that teaches them how to be more successful with your product or service. The more successful they are, the more likely they are to stick around!
By deciding who are strong leads and who need a lot of nurturing, you can tailor your email marketing differently for each. Another of Corey’s ways to segment your subscribers is by
Customers Who Refer
Consider creating a list segment full of those customers who repeatedly refer new business your way. These are your biggest brand advocates, and should receive emails targeted towards loyalty programs, refer-a-friend discounts, even possibly trials for new products or services you're releasing to get honest feedback before widespread rollouts.
Think of how Starbucks has built off of these brand advocates.
Lead segmentation is becoming an important factor for many businesses today. Pamela Vaughan in the article Why List Segmentation Matters explains this below:
Luckily, marketers are at least starting to realize the importance of segmentation in their email communications. In fact, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, 32% of marketers say segmenting their email database is one of their organization's top objectives in the next 12 months. Furthermore, 52% of marketers say they have a great need to improve email database segmentation.
So if you aren't slicing and dicing your email database into various segments and tailoring the content in your emails to those individual groups of contacts, we think you could use some convincing.
Slice and Dice
Slicing and dicing again. When you read something with such odd usage in more than one place, you would be wise to listen. We will look at a simple way to do that at the bottom of this article.
Related article: Marketing Help—Know Your Target Market
Understanding the type of segments you can target is critical to your business. The article Marketing Management and Analysis can help you identify which categories you may want to target. They break down each segment such as Geographical and Behavioral Segmentation with an easy to understand explanation of what each one means.
If you haven’t begun to segment your leads you should take steps to implement this process today. It can have a huge positive impact on your business. If you think this task is too overwhelming, just start small. Look at the kinds of people that you market to. Then take your list and break it down into those groups first. Next you can look at another demographic and sort your list by that. If you have used different landing pages and find that certain people choose one over another, you can divide your group that way. Each time you separate people be sure and add that information to each person. You will end up with a lot of information on each person and you can take any of those characteristics to send particular emails to. See that’s not so hard.
How do you divide your responders?
Image courtesy of bplanet at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image courtesy of nuttakit at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Slice and Dice image: http://i606.photobucket.com/albums/tt141/insman/RC-3KnifeReview002.jpg
Jaco Grobbelaar is the owner of BroadVision Marketing. BroadVision Marketing works with business owners to put in place inbound and outbound marketing strategies that consistently secure new clients. The BroadVision Marketing Training Center is located in Petaluma, CA and primarily serves companies in the San Francisco Bay area.
Jaco can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.766.9778 or connect with Jaco on Facebook - www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing - and LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar. He can also be found at Jaco+.