Let’s Talk Segmentation!
January 22nd, 2010 , Piotr Krupa
Email targeting and audience segmentation is becoming mission-critical to winning the “inbox wars”! And consumers are certainly becoming more receptive to personalization and most forms of targeting, thanks in part to the Behavioral Targeting Standards Consortium. But what about YOU?!
Less than 40% of marketers use personalization beyond first names, let alone behavioral targeting, or remarketing as it’s often called. Perhaps because it seems more about scurrilous marketers tracking online consumers’ every move so they can place the right ads on the right pages at the right moment. Sure, there’s that. But we think it’s different with email marketing…more about getting to know customers as people…with data fields. There’s a difference!
Let’s say you just launched a product campaign and want to capture a ton of info in order to ramp up your customer database and do more target marketing. You would, of course, use GetResponse Email Analytics to capture and assess customer responses from open and click-throughs to landing page to order form (you hope!). For your behavioral targeting projects, you know Google Analytics is integrated with GetResponse, so you have complete access to all that online data, like “who put what in their shopping cart, then forgot to purchase”! Together, they should point to your best remarketing targets AND give you lots of ideas for drip campaigns and triggered email messages, like “50% off the item you selected during your last visit!” Gotcha!
Ok, so now you have “tons of data” to enhance your profiles and improve your target marketing…now what?!! Sorry, but it depends. Here’s where your experience and “people skills” come in. You need to have a deep understanding of your brand or product line, e.g. what customer like/don’t like about it, why they buy (or not), what similar products they purchase, and when/why do they upgrade, etc. So when you create your segmentation fields, you’re going to have an idea of what types of information will be most valuable in targeting your campaigns, e.g. demographics, purchase history, preferences, as well as suggestions for cross-sell and up-sell, all based on your knowledge of your brand AND your customers.
You also have all the demographic information you obtained at sign up or upon initial order. Did you ask 1 or 2 “special interest” questions to jumpstart your profiles? If you didn’t, try it. And, of course, you have your Survey results, right? We know we’ve nagged you about this since 6.0, but only because it’s such an easy (and free!) way to perform market research and effectively segment your profiles and content.
All these activities and tools together provide more than enough data for you to start ramping up your target marketing database and using this information in your link titles, e.g. “Interested in xyz?” Now does all this require time, thought, and some data entry? Absolutely! But honestly, it’s better to build your profiles and your behavioral data stockpile slowly and carefully. Soon you’ll get used to recognizing the exact segment and stats you need for each campaign. Will you make mistakes? Sure, they’ll be a learning curve, BUT did we mention that Jupiter Research reports…
Email campaigns developed with specific behavioral and demographic data can produce more than 18 times higher profits!
Great results, right? So…to help you focus on targeting AND make a lot more money for your business in 2010, GetResponse is going to introduce some cool new tools to segment your lists based on behaviors with just a few clicks! Watch for the announcement – COMING SOON!
Interested in hearing more about target marketing? Let us know!
January 24th, 2010 at 8:16 pm
Good article! What are your sources for the statistics on profits generated from segmented campaigns and percentage of marketers who actually personalize?
January 27th, 2010 at 8:12 am
You wrote that “You need to have a deep understanding of your brand or product line, e.g. what customer like/don’t like about it, why they buy (or not), what similar products they purchase, and when/why do they upgrade, etc.” I would argue that a better focus is to tailor product or service offerings to the needs of one or more ideal targets. This might need research outside the context of email tracking. People can use similar products for different reasons and to satisfy different needs. If you just target behavior this insight can never be obtained because all you see is the outcomes of motivations–never the motivations themselves.
February 8th, 2010 at 10:06 pm
Hi,
This sounds great, but it is very unfortunate that your current fetaures make segmenting very, very hard to do. The obligatory saving of contacts as groups before sending any newsletters out, and the extremely limited search options, and options for collecting data, make this a troublesome task.
February 26th, 2010 at 8:07 am
Nice article..I tell my friend to read this and bookmark..