Working with What You Already Have
Your existing database is a goldmine, and making use of it is a key part of customer acquisition. You can always execute more campaigns to generate more leads, but you’ve won more than half the battle with what you already have. By focusing on your existing database, you can drive, track, and respond to customer activities with customized, relevant and meaningful interactions.
The database in your marketing automation system is capable of automatically creating and managing customer profile activities for any touchpoint throughout any one of your channels. Best-in-Class performers use marketing automation (MA) to filter contacts into or out of marketing programs to achieve precise targeting and campaign effectiveness to create any type of data segment imaginable. Let’s take a closer look at data segmentation and its role in MA.
Segmenting your Database
Segmenting your database in your MA is crucial to engaging with leads and working to drive the sales cycle. Having easy access to demographics and marketing activities segmented on virtually any criteria is vital to understanding prospects, leads and customers. Best-in-Class performers use data segmentation to define a target audience, launch a campaign, trigger real-time lead alerts and gather any report on any engagement.
Data segmentation can become very complex and off-putting for many marketers. Leading marketers, however, have tested and tried many segmentation models and have achieved perfectly viable and often very successful results. Below is a list of different types of segmentations that have worked for Best-in-Class marketers to help you make choices on ways to segment your own data.
1. Granular Lists
Segmentation can be used for smaller, more specific lists. Want a list of people that have requested product demos? What about a list for decision makers, geographical locations, age, gender and more. Creating lists based on these segments will allow you to target communications on a more granular level.
2. Lead Scores
MA enables sales rep to create lists of the highest scoring prospects. This can be used for distributing content to prospects that are most likely to close. Segmenting by lead stage and tailoring content appropriately is an effective and important part of segmentation.
3. Event attendees
Attendees at trade shows and webinars can also be a powerful segmentation list. You can use such a list to communicate with prospects based on topics covered at these events and push them through sales funnel based on targeted content.
4. Product Lines
B2B or B2C companies with multiple product lines create another important segment. Marketing can deliver content based on the products of most interest to prospective customers.
5. Lost Opportunities
If prospects don’t turn into Won business it doesn’t mean that they should fall off the radar. These leads have tremendous value and can be put into further lead nurturing program.
MA and Data Segmentation
Marketing automation allow marketers to target long lists of contacts without losing sight of the details. A powerful MAP enables you to manage hundreds of thousands of potential customers while delivering the right message to the right prospect at the right time. Many lagging companies are dealing with a large amount of imperfect, inconsistent data that restricts them from creating meaningful interactions with prospects and customers. The smallest of things like misspellings and variations in titles result in companies missing valuable prospects and accumulating inaccurate reports. The right MA enables marketers to consolidate all customer data and interaction in a single location. Developing powerful prospect and customer profiles means launching more campaigns, generating more results and demonstrating a higher marketing ROI.