Marketing Insights

Relevance drives conversion! How relevant your message or offer is to the recipient determines how likely it is they will respond. #1 reason why people unsubscribe or opt-out is due to irrelevant messaging, the communication does not make sense or is not targeted to me, so I do not respond and I opt-out. So how can we make sure we are highly relevant to drive conversion and avoid erosion?

We do this with effective segmentation strategies. To help, here are 6 ways to segment…

• Segment by lead source
  • Where did the lead come from? A tradeshow, online ad, webinar, contact us form, an inbound call?
• Segment by behavioral criteria
  • Examples include activity on your website, click-throughs from your email, responses to specific offers and event attendance.
• Segment by lead stage
  • Where they are in the buying cycle? Have they just raised their hand as an inquiry? Are they further down the funnel as a marketing qualified lead? Has sales accepted them and they are an Opportunity or are they already a Customer?
• Segment by contact type
  • Based on who they are to your organization you will need to segment. For instance, prospect vs. customer vs. partner vs. vendor vs. employee.
• Segment by demographic information
  • Based on your business model you may have things like job function, geography, industry, company size.
• And finally, Segment by past purchase history
  • This helps you understand what they’ve purchased – product, version, solutions, etc. and then what you can renew, cross-sell, up-sell or communicate about.

And keep in mind that most effective segmentation strategies will use a combined approach.  The more data you have (target fit criteria and digital body language), the more complete your profile and segmentation strategy will be…further driving relevance.

Remember, relevance drives conversion!

We spend a lot of time in B2B marketing talking about email segmentation, but I recently came across a great example of website segmentation that I’d like to share: www.rallydev.com.

The folks at Rally Software help organizations develop software using Agile practices, so they have several possible purchasers at a company all the way from a Developer to a VP. Take a look at this screen shot from their home page:

I really like this guided, personalized approach because it takes the guesswork out of the web experience for the visitor. If I’m a developer, I can listen to another developer describe the benefits of Rally’s solution. Quick and simple. I don’t have to wade through pages of information to get to the heart of what matters to me.

In the demo center, this concept is carried through again with role-based demos:

Yes, there are product-specific demos on this page as well, but you have to scroll down to find them, presumably for people further along in the buying cycle who are willing to spend a bit more time on the site.

Do you use this guided approach on your website? Have you seen another great example of this concept? Please let me know by sharing a comment.

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Many of us started our email campaign careers in batch and blast mode. Many are still there. But with the tools on the market available today to track your user’s behavior and the ability to sync those tools with your CRM software, the barriers are coming down. It’s time to leap over the hurdles and change your marketing strategy.

One of our Eloqua customers, Mark McCary, Senior Director of Global Marketing at Platts, uses the term “customer-generated marketing”. (You know, as opposed the marketing-generated marketing that most of us are currently doing.) Marketing Sherpa calls this concept “triggered email”. No matter what name you give it, it’s your goal.

I’m not naive. I know it’s easy for me to spout off about what you should be doing, and blithely overlook the fact that this is a massive change in your strategy. Your email blast numbers will dramatically decrease. However, conversely, your email campaign metrics should dramatically increase. As an added bonus, your campaign will have a longer lifespan since users can be triggering the campaign for as long as you have it running. 

If you’re experiencing resistance, offer to test marketing-generated versus customer-generated campaigns and let the numbers speak for themselves. Here is an excellent takeaway from the recent Marketing Sherpa Email Summit:

John Heidrich and Joe Nettum from Allstate described how their team is moving toward a triggered email strategy…They compared results from a campaign to encourage customers to sign up for an online account service system. One set of messages was sent batch-style to the entire list, and another set was sent to new customers, triggered by policy purchases:

• Open rates for the triggered email messages increased 84% over the batch messages
• Clickthrough rates for the triggered email messages increased 32%

Yeah, those numbers will speak quite eloquently for themselves.

What types of things should trigger an email campaign?

Certainly a purchase qualifies. But website surfing is your next best friend. For example, if you have three main products described on your website, you can measure the number of page visits to each area. Which product has the most page views? That should trigger an email to the prospect about that specific product. (What if they’re all three equal? Send an email with a comparison matrix to help the prospect differentiate your offerings!) You can also trigger off of whitepaper downloads, product trial downloads, abandoned purchases, and much more.

We’ll write about other triggers in a future post, but first….tell us your ideas! Have you seen anything work well? Is there something you want to try?

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Photo credit: timsnell | flickr