This content from: Small Business Marketing Blog - Strategies That Increase Sales

Good marketing is all about relevancy.

“Getting the right Message, to the right people, at the right time”, you’ve heard that before, right?

How can you increase the relevancy of your marketing? One way to is to send more specific messages to more specific groups.

To send messages to specific groups, you need to segment your list. If you think of your list as one big group, then segmenting creates subgroups within that group.

To determine which Segments you need, think about the groups of people in your list. Think about how you would talk to them in person. Does a conversation with your best customer sound the same as one with a stranger? Have you ever received an offer from a company to buy a service and you’ve been buying that service from them for years? Then you know how off-putting this can be.

Here are four segments that most businesses should set up to get started:

• Active Customers
• Past Customers
• Referral / Strategic Partners
• Leads

Think about what you want to say to each of these segments when crafting your next marketing message.

Let’s say you publish a newsletter. Is that newsletter relevant to each of the four segments listed above? Should you have one newsletter with content targeted to each segment? Would it be more effective to have one for customers (past and present) and one for everyone else?

Here are some others you may want to consider.

Segments based on demographic data

Would you be able to create better messages and offers if you had segments base on factors such as:

• age
• income
• sex
• education
• location
• marital status
• occupation

Behavioral Data  

Segments based on an individuals actions can also help you create better messages. Some examples of behavioral data include:

• bought a product
• visited a specific page on your website
• opens/reads all your email messages
• attended an event
• downloaded information from your website
• redeemed a coupon

Preference and Opinion Data 

Opinions and preferences data are another way to create segments. You can collect this data through surveys, polls, focus groups, or conversations. Preference and opinion data may include:

• how often they want to hear from you
• the best way to contact them (phone, text, email, etc.)
• the types of products that interest them
• the biggest challenges facing them this year
• how often they attend conferences (or other events)

There are many other ways to segment your lists. The important thing to remember – make your communications as relevant as possible.

If you don’t use segments yet, give them a try and let me know how your response rate changes.

Photo credit – Danilo on Flickr

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