If you want better market segmentation, you need better data. This allows you to tailor your messages to each segment so that those emails appear more personalized and engaging to your leads. But, if you aren’t really able to segment your contacts because the data you have on them is slim, here are a few suggestions on how to fill in those gaps — and how you can even get your leads to help you in that process.
Start With What You Know
Whether you’ve purchased a lead list or you’ve found new contacts using prospecting automation, you’ll probably start segmenting your database based on the biggest differentiator: industry. At the very least, this indicates what language, subject matter, products, and services are the most appropriate for grabbing reader attention.
Example: Referencing patient care and telehealth when emailing a healthcare segment about software solutions you offer.
Use High-Level Messaging
When industry is the only way to divide your leads, your emails will still need to stay relatively high level. For our example, you may not know whether you’re contacting a nurse, doctor, physician’s assistant, IT manager, or CEO unless the data you’ve already collected happens to include job titles. The same goes for knowing whether you’re reaching out to someone at a private practice versus a hospital system. If you aren’t aware which solution or service you offer is most appropriate for the recipients of your emails, you’ll probably choose to either rotate your offerings in each message, or widely reference all of them in the hopes that the right leads will take notice and respond.
Get Your Leads to Tell You More
Create opportunities for leads to share more information with you. Not only does this help you personalize their experience, it gets you what you’ve wanted from the beginning: more people engaging with your brand.
How do you do that? Asking questions is a good place to start. By this point, you’ve probably already been asking leads about the products and services they need — or, at the very least, who the best person is to talk to about them. As you hear back from your leads, update that information in their profiles for Product A or Service B, etc.
You may also notice other relevant information courtesy of a respondent’s email signature: updated contact information, job titles, physical addresses, and organization names, to name a few. Following our healthcare example, this information helps you refine lists for hospitals and private practices, or segment out CEOs and C-Suite officers from nursing staff, billing, and IT.
Check Your Analytics
Even if leads don’t respond directly, their electronic behavior can give you clues into the data that you’re missing. For instance, look at who’s opening your emails, clicking on links to your website, and visiting specific pages. That can help you learn more about the effectiveness of your messaging, and which services are the most popular. Plus, for those leads who are consistently engaging with your content, it’s worth your time to do a little research on LinkedIn to see if you can find their job title and organization — and connect with them to show that you’re interested in a new business discussion.
You can also look at website traffic using tools like Google Analytics to see which products and services have the most visibility, and therefore deserve more focus in your marketing emails.
Use Landing Page Prompts
If you can funnel leads to a specific landing page on your website — like one that offers a lead magnet or other piece of valuable content — encourage them to provide you with additional information about themselves. We don’t simply mean the contact information required to unlock your lead magnet, but what their motivation is for even looking at it in the first place. For example, prompt your leads with questions like, What’s your role at your organization? Or, What services are most important to your team?
Then, as you collect this information, apply it to your segmentation and make your outreach as pertinent and timely as possible. The end result? More conversations and more conversions.
Want guidance on how to refine your own contact data? Let’s schedule some time to talk about it. Click the button below to get started.
