James Spillane
In today’s world of email inbox overload, targeted messages are the best way to break through. Marketing automation and database segmentation lets you target your audience more effectively. Here’s how to get started.
Understanding Segmentation
Segmentation of your database and personalization of automated messages is one of the key benefits of using a marketing automation solution. This is why you should start thinking about how your data is organized and categorized before you implement a marketing automation platform.
One very common type of segmentation in marketing is segmenting by job title. You may wish to send one message to VPs of Marketing and a different message to sales operations; to accomplish this, you’ll need to be able to segment your database.
The problem is, unless you’ve been extremely meticulous with each record that you have stored in your database(s), there are dozens of ways to account for each of these titles. We know that VP of Mktg. and Vice President of Marketing mean the same thing, but our software applications don’t know that. To account for all of these different values, we can start to associate each individual value with one “bucket” value.
Preparation Approach
To start preparing for efficient segmentation, create a new pick list field, which we’ll call Title Bucket. This field should account for all of the different types of messages that you want to send. If you want to send one message to marketers are the VP/Director level, a separate message to the CMO and a separate message to the rest of the marketing department, you need a specific value in your Title Bucket picklist for each one.
Consider having a free text ‘Job Title’ field where leads provide their real title – the one that makes them feel good. Then ask for a ‘Role’ or ‘Seniority’ field which is your main bucket. If you really want to take the burden off the lead, run data management flows to map this data automatically.
Remember that marketing automation is a journey, not a destination. You will always find ways to improve what you’ve built.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by James Spillane.
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Buyer personas and segmentation are key in implementing a successful marketing automation strategy. Hatchbuck allows users to tag a contact, making it simple and easy to segment. Here is a simple introduction of buyer personas from Hatchbuck – http://www.hatchbuck.com/blog/simple-introduction-personas/