How to Design a Contact Segmentation Strategy

Transcript

Hi I’m Rich – Head Writer at Insynth and today we’ll be talking about segmentation and why it’s important in creating a successful email marketing strategy.

In order to provide true value to your clients and customers, you need to understand their needs. And this is where segmentation comes in.

Segmentation essentially means serving up the right content to the right audience and the right time. In doing so, you’ll achieve success. 

 

A segmentation strategy involves:
-  Having a clean and organised database
-  Collecting the right information, and
-  Understanding the data for your segments

So before beginning your contact segmentation strategy, it’s crucial that your database is clean and healthy.

Each contact record should have key information that will allow you to segment them appropriately.

 

At a basic level, this might be name, email, phone number and job role

As you get more sophisticated with your marketing efforts, you may delve a bit deeper and consider – geographical location, age of prospect, industry sector and so on…

So how do you segment your customers? Here’s a simple strategy that we recommend to all our clients here at Insynth.

Once your contacts have been categorised according to your goals, you can begin segmenting your customers into groups of your choice.

There’s no right or wrong answer here — it’s dependent on your specific business, customers, and the goals you’ve set.

For example, if you want to share targeted ads with your audience members and customers in the West Midlands in hopes of boosting conversions in that region, you can geographically segment your customers.

Or, if you may want to segment your audience members around job role. A specifier will have different needs to a contractor, for example.

Next, target and reach your customer segments

Once you’ve segmented your customers, it’s time to determine how you’ll target them across your organisation.

By ensuring all departments (e.g. marketing, sales, and service) understand how your customers are segmented, members of those departments will be able to effectively target your customers through their work.

To go back to my previous example,
Architects and specifiers may want to receive information that will help them with their product research. Product emails, technical content and so on.

Finally, analyse your customer segments and make adjustments as needed

Check in with your marketing, sales, and service teams (as often as you want) to get their opinions on any necessary segmentation adjustments. You can also experiment with new ways of grouping your customers together to decide what makes the most sense.

You can also gather feedback from your customers to more effectively segment them into appropriate groups.

For example, you could conduct surveys to improve your behavioural segmentation by asking customers about their feature use and product-use habits and tendencies. This will allow you to more accurately organise customers based on their specific behaviours.

Customer segmentation helps you boost conversions, reach your audience through cross-team (marketing, sales, service, product, etc.) efforts, and communicate more effectively with customers to meet their specific needs. So, begin working on your customer segmentation strategy and use HubSpot’s recommended tools for support along the way.

Thanks, and speak soon!