Free Marketing Tips
Tips & Tricks to Segmenting Your Marketing Campaigns
Ever wonder why telemarketers frustrate you so much? It’s not just because they always call during dinner. It’s because they’re not talking to you. They’re reading from a script, the same script they’ve read countless times before. And you can tell.
Segmenting your marketing campaigns changes this and positions you as the anti-telemarketer!
List segmentation involves taking a broad group or list and creating subcategories based on shared demographic, lifestyle, or psychographic characteristics. By segmenting our customers into different subcategories, we can make more targeted experiences that result in better marketing and a better ROI from our marketing efforts.
Taking the time to segment your marketing campaign comes with many powerful benefits.
Tighter Messaging
The first is the one we just mentioned—the ability to send highly targeted messaging to specific segments. We understand that not all customers are interested in the same things. Segmenting our marketing campaigns allows us to send DIYers a list of the top projects they can combat this spring and Professional Contractors’ promotions on buying in bulk.
Better Relationship Building
Do you know that friend who always gives you the best gifts? Customer list segmentation allows you to become that friend by giving your customers exactly what interests them. The result is that you can create a better relationship between that customer and your brand. Over time, they’ll look for marketing from you. You become the postcard they don’t throw out, the newsletter they never miss, or the email they can’t wait to receive.
Money &Time Saving
Of course, segmentation isn’t only about creating a better relationship with your customer (though that’s pretty great); it’s also about saving your business time and money. By segmenting your marketing campaigns, you reduce time and costs by only targeting a portion of your prospect list instead of wasting dollars sending everyone a message only some will be interested in. That’s less wasted resources and less time spent creating copy; only some will want to read.
Better Response Rates
What happens when you send someone an offer explicitly crafted for people like them? They act on it. They buy the product, contact you about the service, and begin (or continue) authentic engagement with your brand. What happens when you send everyone an offer created for a generic, nameless customer? Nothing. Crickets.
How to Segment Your Prospect List
Okay, so you’re hopefully gleefully riding the segmentation train. How do you do it?
How Narrow Should You Go?
While you should create as many groups as possible for your business, start by making three good ones. Segmenting your audience too broadly will limit your ability to target that segment closely, while segmenting too narrowly may create redundancies and/or reduce profitability. You want to segment customers by the common characteristics shown to affect conversions.
For example, if you’re a local hardware shop, you may only find that you have two customer types — Commercial and DIY. If you’re a local jeweler, you may want to create an entire segment for marketing at Special Occasions, Men Buying for Wives or Bridal. Identifying your segments should become intuitive once you get into your customer data.
The segments you create should be unique, identifiable, and different from one another. If you find segments beginning to overlap, you have gone too narrow. Consider if there’s a broader category into which both subsets would fall. The more specific you can make your segment, the tighter you’ll be able to market to them, and the more successful your campaign will be.
Types of Segments to Consider:
Geographic: This involves segmenting your prospect list based on zip code, state, region, or another geographic marker.
Demographic: This involves segmenting your prospect list based on age, gender, nationality, or occupation.
Psychographic: This involves segmenting your prospect list based on personal values, hobbies, interests, etc.
Buyer Behavior: This involves segmenting your prospect list based on buying history—for example, customers who purchased higher-dollar items or routinely purchase from a single inventory category.
Influence Level: This involves segmenting your prospect list by their influence on your company, whether the potential for profit or social visibility identifies that influence.
Last Interaction: This involves segmenting your prospect list based on their previous interaction with your brand.
Once you have identified your customer buckets, you can create targeted, segmented marketing campaigns designed to speak directly to them. You should also keep track of the users in your segment over time, as people can move between segments and in and out of them. Customer segmentation does not remain static. Your interests change, right? So do your customers.
If you’d prefer not to create your segments by hand, the Personicx Portrait Report (Learn about Portrait Reports) from SL360™ can help you create personas around your customers. These clusters allow you to see the differences between your customer and the national average, identifying their life stage, interests, and buying behaviors to understand better who they are. By allowing the application to identify your top personas, you can focus on how to market to them.
Customer list segmentation allows you to send the right message to the right person at the right time in their buying cycle. The result is tighter messaging, happier customers, a better ROI, and a better response. Why wouldn’t you segment your customers?
Ready to segment your prospect list for a better response?
Contact us at 800-399-8611
