Email marketing would be significantly easier if every customer had the exact same needs and interests. Then you could just focus all your efforts on this small list of "what people want" and leave work at noon every day. What a marvelous dream.
But we all know marketing isn't so simple. While there are both general and detailed best practices that can be followed with regards to email timing, layout, content and everything else even vaguely associated with your message like what time you should eat breakfast the day you send a newsletter and in which direction the wind should be blowing when you click the launch button, no list of best practices is likely to be a perfect match for your database.
So how can you get the highest return on investment from your email marketing efforts? By using segmentation to test different approaches and to create more targeted, relevant messages for your subscribers.
Why Segment?
As I’ve noted in several recent posts that preceded this one, emails that are more targeted to the interests / experiences of a particular group of people are more likely to provide a higher return on investment than emails that try to do everything for everyone. That doesn’t mean all of your emails need to be targeted (a newsletter, for example, will usually go out to everyone), but many kinds of emails will perform better if they are targeted to specific groups.
Some example uses for segmenting:
Limiting the geographic reach of a message. If I was going to have a breakfast seminar in Nashville, I could limit my email invitations to people who live in Tennessee or Kentucky. This would save money since I’m not blasting the invite out to everyone I know and keep customers in, say, Oregon from getting annoyed at receiving an email invite to a morning presentation that they are highly unlikely to fly all the way to Tennessee to attend.
Sending different messaging to customers and prospects. A customer’s relationship with your company differs from that of a prospect and it couldn’t hurt for your communication to reflect this fact.
Tailoring a message to the customer’s interests. If you offer products or services that can be sorted intro broad categories, then you could sort your customers along similar lines based on purchasing history or most recent purchases. The primary focus of your message could be on the apparent interests of a specific group of customers and then a smaller portion of the message could deal with other types of products / services.
Creating lists based on record owner. If each of your customers has an account representative, then you can split the messaging up so that groups of customers receive the messaging from their specific rep. This can make the message more personal than a standard bulk email.
Splitting recent customers from those who are not so recent. Someone who last made a purchase nine months ago may need different messaging than someone who made a purchase last week.
How to Segment
Preparation for segmentation begins with the data collection process. The more data you collect, the more segmenting you can do. Though you do have to consider that the more info you request, the more resistant people will be to providing you with any info. But lots of useful data, like type and date of purchase, can be collected without needing the customer to fill anything extra out.
With the data in hand, you can segment when you create your list. How you set up your segment will depend on whether you’re building the list by “Creating a New List of Leads and Contacts” or by “Using a Salesforce Campaign.” Let’s take a look at both.
Creating a New List of Leads and Contacts
When you select to Create a New List of Leads and Contacts the system prompts you to enter search parameters so it can find people who match your query. So, unless you simply create a search which finds every record that has an email address, you’re already using this tool to segment your database at some level. But let’s look at how you can use this tool to create most of the example segments I noted above:
Limiting the message’s geographic reach: To find those members of a database who live in Tennessee or Kentucky, you’d do a search for “State” “Equals” “TN, KY”. Placing a comma between each state tells the system to perform an OR search. Since this is an OR search, the system will find everyone whose state matches either Tennessee or Kentucky. If you did an AND search, the system would only find people whose state matched both Tennessee and Kentucky at the same time (which would be no one).
Different messaging for customers versus prospects: If you’re using Salesforce exactly as intended, then your prospects will be Leads and your customers will be Contacts making it very easy to sort the two. If you’re not using Salesforce in this way, then you’ll need to have a field indicating this info and search for it using a similar method as used in the state search.
Creating lists based on record owner: In this case you’d do a search of “Owner-First Name” “Equals” and then click the magnifying glass to choose the owner (or owners) whose records you want to include in the list.
Separating recent customers from those who are not recent: You’ll need to create a custom field for Last Purchase Date within Salesforce. Then to find more recent purchases you can do a similar search to: “Last Purchase Date” is “Greater or Equal” to “11/04/2009”. To find less recent customers you’d do a search for: “Last Purchase Date” is “Less Than” “11/04/2009”.
Using a Salesforce Campaign
To create a list using this method, all you do is choose the campaign whose members you want to use as a list. There is no filtering here - all campaign members become part of the list. So any segmentation done through this method must be done when you’re adding people to the campaign.
The most common way to add people to a Salesforce campaign is to run a report and then use the Add Members to Campaign button within that report. You can customize reports using the exact same search functionality that’s available when Creating a List of Leads and Contacts. To do this, all you have to do is go to Reports > Create New Custom Report or use the Customize button to “Select Criteria” within an already created report.
Have you had any success creating targeted lists? Let everyone know in the comments.
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