personal matters: data types for effective b2b …...personal matters: data types for effective b2b...

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DATA TYPES FOR EFFECTIVE B2B SEGMENTATION

PERSONAL MATTERS:

Practical Segmentation

Applied in Email Marketing

and Beyond

http://www.infotelligent.com

Every marketer knows that targeted and segmented communications yield better results than mass blasts. MailChimp’s research confirms it’s no contest; segmented email marketing campaigns get better results across every KPI, driving 100% higher click-through rates, while significantly increasing open rates and reducing unsubscribes by about 10%.

Whether you want to increase opens, clicks, and conversions or reduce bounces and unsubscribes, adding a little more targeted relevance can go a long way.

This guide provides simple, yet powerful tips that will help anyone – from first timers to veterans who could use a reminder - to maximize results with solid fundamentals of effective segmentation.

We take you on a journey of revising your existing customer and prospect data and help you craft a strategy for acquiring and utilizing additional data to make your email marketing (and beyond) more effective.

Given that email marketing remains both the most effective and least difficult marketing strategy to execute, your organization will likely find significant ROI improvements from minor adjustments to existing practices, while supplementing the data already within your reach.

Value vs. Cost: How Bad Data Quality Damages Your Sender Score

Before you can begin segmenting your lists and effectively optimizing any email marketing strategy, you’ll need valid and complete contact data for your targets.

With 30% of contact data in a database going stale every year coupled with continuous unsubscribes, if you haven’t replaced or refreshed your database lately, you will soon have no audience to reach. Image source: www.mailchimp.com

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PERSONAL MATTERS: Data Types for Effective B2B Segmentation

https://mailchimp.com/resources/effects-of-list-segmentation-on-email-marketing-stats/



Buyer personas are research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions. Today, I now include where they buy, as well as when buyers decide to buy.

How can you extend the lifespan of usable prospect data?

To procure up-to-date contact information and obtain more net new names, your organization must hire researchers, purchase prospecting lists from external providers or do a little bit of both. It’s likely that you start with the purchased list followed by a significant amount of time spent on cleaning and massaging it.

Does this sound familiar: you buy a new list only to find that 20-40% of contacts are already stale? You manage to extract some quality new names, but then need to return the bounces to the provider and fill in the blanks with your own research. Despite the new acquired contacts, the damage is already done—you emailed contacts who are no longer there, casting a spammer suspicion on your clean Sender Score.

Not only is buying data expensive, the cost of bad data is severe: your company’s reputation, potential fines, spam complaints, blacklists, frustrated colleagues, and plummeting engagement chipping away at your ROI until campaigns turn into nothing more than sunk costs.

How can you be sure that you’re buying the right list and not wasting money on bad data?

Buyer Personas: Start with What (and Who) You Know

Before buying third party intelligence, define all the attributes of your ideal buyer.

A great place to start is by looking at your Buyer Personas, or, if you don’t have them, describe your best buyers in a way that the concept founder, Tony Zambito did:

B2B buyer personas combine attributes of the companies you’re targeting and personal characteristics of key decision-makers or influencers.

Based on the customer data you already have, create 3-6 distinct personas that represent different customer types. Make sure that personas do not overlap. Personas will help you focus on a dialogue with your best prospects in the most relevant way, based on their needs with messages and strategies customized to each segment.

Take a close look at the attributes of your best customers to discover and bring buyer personas to life as real people you can recognize, and isolate and focus on with effective, customized creatives.

Start out small; fewer personas are better at first, so you can really focus on the data, develop and adjust your strategy, and reach each segment with increasing effectiveness. Once you’ve defined your data points and created some buyer personas to test, you’ll finally have a baseline to adjust from. Over time, these adjustments allow you to start connecting with more pitch-perfect bullseyes rather than merely “reaching the target.”

After you’ve exhausted your internal data sources, and you’ve made the necessary adjustments to your personas, it may be time to start looking externally for a reliable data provider. Choosing one from the sea of what’s out there can feel overwhelming, but don’t worry, it’s not as hard as you think!

Keep in mind that while there are countless options for data providers, there aren’t many good ones. The reality is that there aren’t many providers producing and manually maintaining their own data. Even fewer fully stand behind the data they sell by guaranteeing its accuracy.



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https://infusemedia.com/steps-for-creating-marketing-personas-for-b2b-brands/

THE 5 MAIN WAYS TO SEGMENT YOUR LIST

There are countless approaches to segmentation, and while the following five methods may not seem exhaustive or particularly advanced, they remain the most relevant dimensions to master and apply in B2B marketing, generating a 760% increase in revenue compared to unsegmented campaigns.

Demographic segmentation differentiates prospects by using any quantifiable characteristics of a person or business. For people, this includes the age, gender, location, job, position and salary of a person within the company you’re targeting. Company-based demographics (also called “firmographics”) include variables like the industry sector, the size of the company, ownership type, and their ranking in the marketplace (e.g. Fortune 500).

Demographic information is mostly static and implies a “wide-net” approach by differentiating through fairly general and easily observed criteria. Don’t assume that the large ‘catch’ offered by demographic segmentation doesn’t have value just because it’s not hyper-targeted.

Whether demographic segmentation is relevant to your campaign goals depends on your initial research. If you can distinguish the right segments for your business based on demographic/firmographic data alone, great! You’ll be able to improve your targeting effectiveness right away.

Infotelligent offers company and contact demographics data that has been manually collected and validated by our own researchers that you can use in demographics-based segmentation.

#1 Demographics



https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-new-rules/



Technographic segmentation differentiates prospects by using any technology already installed by a prospect account. Installed hardware or software may make the prospect a more suitable fit for your product or service, if software or hardware that you offer is compatible with their existing tech infrastructure.

Conversely, if your solution does not integrate well or is simply incompatible with the technology your prospects already have, selling into these accounts will be an inefficient use of your sales team’s time that’s unlikely to generate a respectable ROI.

Technology is no longer purchased or sold as a stand-alone solution. It’s likely that your prospects assess your offer in part based on compatibility with their existing “tech stack.”

If you know “the easiest to integrate with” solutions based on your current customers’ installed technology, or installed technology that the alternative you offer successfully replaces, make sure your pitch incorporates this critical detail.

Ideal Customer Profile is derived from a combination of account firmographics and technographics. Knowing the profile of your ideal customer allows you to focus on the accounts with the profiles most likely to convert.

Competitive Displacement

A special case of the technographics strategy is seeking and targeting accounts that are currently using your competitors’ solutions. If you are mounting a competitive replacement campaign, you will need to purchase multiple lists, because your competitor will simply not disclose their customer names publicly, while a single list provider won’t have a complete list of all competitors’ clients.

Collecting competitive intelligence from multiple sources will ensure you cover more accounts with the competitive displacement offer.

Infotelligent tracks 4,000+ installed software products, enabling segmentation by technographics and making your prospecting efforts more productive.

#2 Technographics

Preferences and interests can be incorporated into a more complex and nuanced buyer persona. This is where pop-up surveys, questionnaires or sign-up forms can really shine by indicating your audience’s current interests, as well as provide a baseline that helps indicate trends and shifting tides.

While this tactic can significantly improve results, the required data comes with a shorter shelf life. Preferences and interests can change quickly based on changing priorities and sales cycle stage of your prospects.

When collecting prospect profiles generated from a company’s Download Premium Content form, make sure to follow up immediately: when the prospects are interested in the topic, it can be a sign of an imminent sales cycle. Upon completing their research, prospects can move to vendor selection and an RFP stage at any moment.

Include more of similar content in targeted campaigns to make sure the follow-up is aligned with displayed interests facilitating prospect’s journey down the buying funnel.

Data quality is non-negotiable as a starting point of effective direct marketing in general, but it’s even more critical for precision targeting the small windows of buyer’s research and purchasing cycle.

#3 Interests & Preferences



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Behavioral information enables a deeper and more detailed segmentation. Because it relies on recent data that reflects highly dynamic variables that can change at any moment, any action you plan to take based on behavioral data must be immediate.

Behavioral segmentation is based on data points such as:

You can begin segmenting users based on recorded behavior, and even combine behavioral data points to build hyper-targeted segments in areas where behaviors overlap and suggest a correlation between several events. Armed with this insight, you’ll be able to build a number of distinct behavioral segments and targeting strategies depending on specific behavior signals.

Past purchases, including time since last purchase and purchase frequency

Website behavior and engagement - downloading premium content or visiting several pages and the average session duration for each a page

Email engagement - opens and clicks

Social media engagement with your brand or a competitor

Search activity

#4 Behavior & Implied Intent



Psychographics is a complex segmentation tactic that attempts to predict customer behavior based on attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, such as personality traits, belief systems, cultural norms and traditions.

Psychographic segmentation predicts what people are prone to do and what they will react to, as well as helps understand the variables driving their behaviors. Or, as HubSpot says: “Demographics explain “who” your buyer is, while psychographics explain “why” they buy.”

Obtaining psychographic data to segment your email lists is not an easy undertaking. The potential payoff needs to be weighed carefully against the cost of acquisition to discern potential value.

If you are interested in experimenting with psychographic segmentation, conduct interviews with existing clients, leverage deeper website analytics to get a better grasp of the underlying “why.” You can apply these findings to segment and target people even more precisely, as well as start to more accurately predict their future behaviors.

#5 Psychographics

Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stefanomaggi/3822006059

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-are-psychographics-faqs-ht#sm.0000e1dueky7ze9ntpx18ueqfirv7

http://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/marketing-psychographics

Email: [email protected]

Alexander Kesler Bio:

Let’s get in touch! Office: +1 (617) 459-4500

Alexander is a visionary digital marketer with over 15 years in the industry delivering proven results through dynamic B2B campaigns. Incorporating best practices of content marketing, ABM, and Intent and AI-driven lead generation, Alexander turns ground-breaking concepts into ROI-propelling products and highly effective B2B growth solutions.

Through the mix of industry expertise and a talented team behind him, Alexander consistently deploys a suite of innovative programs that have delivered revenue growth for over 400 clients to date across his brands.

As the CEO of Infotelligent, Alexander is once again poised to shake up the industry by launching a premier B2B data provider to help sales & marketing organizations find results across all needs, industries and company sizes.

Infotelligent helps B2B companies efficiently reach the right accounts for the growth opportunity at hand, whether in sales, marketing, or recruiting. In a sea of companies with iffy B2B data accuracy, Infotelligent is a lighthouse guiding you to better decisions in sales and marketing. Our data integrity isn’t a product; it’s a rock-solid foundation of trust that we build our company and partnerships on.

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BEFORE YOU START, SEGMENT SOME MORE

Optimal segmentation across any criteria begins with selecting the right tools. MailChimp, Customer.io, AWeber, and many others, offer complex segmentation options, as well as the capability to A/B test your segments campaigns in-depth.

Getting segmentation right is time consuming. Yet, if you have a guiding strategy and invest in rigorously testing the various segmentation alternatives, the ROI will be well worth it.



http://mailchimp.com/

https://customer.io/

https://www.aweber.com

personal matters: data types for effective b2b …...personal matters: data types for effective b2b...

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