Think you know the recipe for the perfect database? Whether it's your customer or prospect emailing database?
Whether your database is your grandmother's age or was designed by young marketing chiefs, it may not always be mouth-watering. In other words, you've got a substantial prospect database, but you're seeing stagnation in its performance (open rate, reactivation rate...) as well as in ROI. It's simmering, but there's no explosion of flavors to get everyone excited...
If your CRM or PRM campaigns often go unheeded, it may be time to reorganize your kitchen! From now on, you need to think in terms of emailing segmentation.
Everyone's palate is different... Distributing the same dish to thousands of guests doesn't benefit your emailing strategy. By sending generic campaigns to as many people as possible, you forget the specificities of your targets. You neglect the specific problems of your contacts, and by the same token, the quest for your buyer persona.
No, to maximize the KPI's and, above all, the ROI of your campaigns, you'll need to adapt your communication strategy, segment and treat profiles with the utmost care. Here's THE recipe:
1 . Segment your targets by demographic data
By making this initial sorting easy and objective by surname, first name, age, gender... you ensure better targeting in terms of content and form. For the first, it's a question of selecting products and aiming right. For example, do you sell hearing aids? There's no point in soliciting 22-year-old Kevin, even if he lives with airpods that he saturates with good old Metallica at full blast.
In terms of form, segmentation will enable you to personalize your e-mails more effectively, as you'll be able to adapt the lifestyle visuals, wording and colors of your newsletters so that they hit the mark. Your buyer persona, i.e. your ideal customer, will recognize and react to you if you send them content that resembles them.
2. Cut by geolocation of your prospects
Email segmentation by location is very simple to set up, and can be very effective if your products and/or services vary from one region to another. For example, if you're an ISP and you only want to target fiber-connected households.
Geolocating your prospects can also be very effective in a Drive-to-store campaign. By addressing an audience located close to the point of sale concerned, you'll multiply the chances of moving crowds there. You should also take into account the deceptive effect of a product that isn't available within 200 kilometers (for God's sake, when is the Starbucks in Charleville Mézières opening 😢?!!!!).
3. Send content that's just right
The trickier part is to look atappetence by content type, in order to boost your conversion rate. How do you do this? Quite simply, by studying your prospects' behavior in detail, according to the menus they are offered. Not a fork in their steak? Perhaps they were vegans... In any case, your communication was not adapted. It's up to you to study the behavior of your prospects in relation to the type of content and products most visited/clicked on, in order to improve your choice of presentation in your newsletters.
Alternatively, you can ask your prospects directly about their interests and product appetence. In this way, you'll be able to refine your email targeting and segmentation to offer content that's tailored to your customers' needs:
- by pushing offers on products identical to those they like best,
- by pushing offers on products that complement the ones they like.
4. Get to the heart of the emailing business
Your mission: to measure, analyze and use the activity of your prospects vs. your communications. How do you do this? By tracking opens and clicks... This data is decisive in defining and adapting your communication frequency according to your emailing segmentation. In concrete terms, you won't treat a prospect who hasn't opened one of your newsletters since the Caramail era in the same way as one who reacts to your newsletters with the frequency of Trumpesque tweets.
There's no point in stuffing the first, when you can serve up the second again and again. So it's a good idea to determine a mailing frequency based on your prospects' actual activity. This essential precaution will enable you to considerably limit the churn rate.
As for those who play dead, more commonly known as inactive leads, they need to be reactivated via another, more specific communication tunnel.
5. Analyze wastage in your conversion tunnel
Focus here on the specimen who was behaving well, who had filled his basket and who, ô misfortune, ended up abandoning his basket. The event is suspicious enough to arouse your interest. If you don't, this quasi-customer may never go through with the purchase.
If you're running an e-commerce site, it's crucial to have a clear view of the conversion tunnel, to analyze your prospects' attitudes and see where they stand. You need to set up a specific emailing program for shopping cart abandonment syndrome, based on where your prospect has left the conversion tunnel. And treat each symptom differently.
To know if your recipe is working, there's only one guide: your KPI's ! So, like any recipe, let it rest for a while before tasting it. But if your emailing segmentation strategy remains ineffective, that doesn't make you a bad cook! You simply need to revise the recipe.
Don't forget, too, that segmentation may not work during certain holiday periods, such as Christmas or Valentine's Day, when your contacts buy not for themselves, but for their loved ones. You can then take advantage of these phases to use generic e-mails and target a wider audience.
