Imagine you’re 16 years old, it’s the first day of your public exams, it feels a little scary and certainly you’re apprehensive. Your life’s path could be defined by these very results. Even writing this now gives me a sense of past nervousness, so I can’t imagine how it feels for today’s students.
Now rewind to a few months earlier when you’re in the midst of creating a revision plan. If your revision plan consisted of a single method of learning for all your subjects, then the likelihood of you doing well in all your subjects is far less than having a specific approach for each subject.
After all, Mathematics requires a lot of problem solving and deep understanding; English requires the art of writing and History the need to remember well.
But this seems obvious, yet so many businesses have a single approach to their marketing as opposed to multiple approaches for each segment.
Let me explain, if you are an established business, you will have many customers. The customers would have bought different products or services, come from different industries, have different company profiles or for consumers come from different demographics.
So it makes perfectly good sense to market each segment individually, but you can only do this if your data is segmented correctly and the quality of your data is good.
Without segmentation you’re approach to marketing will be diminished.
Let’s look at some numbers.
Imagine you have a company that’s selling a CRM application and over the years your uptake has been good and you now have 1,000 clients.
You’ve cleverly designed and priced your CRM application to cater for small users and large corporates, but you don’t know for sure which account falls into which category.
Let’s assume that 80% are small users and the remaining 20% large users.
You add a very important module to your CRM application that can only be effective for the large corporate.
You design a marketing campaign to send to your database (all 1,000).
The leads generated from the campaign total 20. So you conclude that’s a return of 20 out of 1,000 which is 2%.
You’re not too happy about that because from an existing customer list you would expect much more.
So you can wrongly conclude the campaign wasn’t a success.
The truth is only 20% of the 1,000 was targeted, that’s 200 customers. So your actual return was 20 out of 200 which is 10%, which is so much better.
By segmenting the leads we have a 500% better ROI rate and an accurate assessment of the campaign’s effectiveness.
This simple example illustrates the massive impact of not segmenting.
You don’t really get the right picture of what’s going on, you draw the wrong conclusions and potentially sabotage good campaigns.
You can’t make good decisions without segmentation because your customers are not all the same and will respond to different messages.
So how can you segment your database. There are two categories:
1. What’s Specific To Your Business
2. What’s Specific To Your Customer
2. What’s Specific To Your Customer
What’s Specific to Your Business?
So in this category are the specifics of your business. Here are some segmentation variables:
1. Products
2. Services
3. Level of Repeat Business or Renewals
4. Frequency of Purchases
5. Last Purchase Date
6. Amount Purchased
7. Engagement Online
8. And so on…
2. Services
3. Level of Repeat Business or Renewals
4. Frequency of Purchases
5. Last Purchase Date
6. Amount Purchased
7. Engagement Online
8. And so on…
What’s Specific to Your Customer?
Some attributes for a customer or prospect are specific to them. The diagrams below highlight some of the ways you can segment B2B and B2C data.
So, if you don’t have the level of segmentation you desire or haven’t started the process of segmentation, then to see what’s possible, take advantage of our no obligation audit.
Don’t wait any longer to finely segment your database because you can get some truly impressive marketing results, contact us and we can walk you through the process.