In a perfect world, marketers would only market to the right prospects with the best possible message. It’s no secret that a compelling message targeted to the right person provides the best chance at engaging a prospect and converting them into a customer. Modern marketers can create these tailored messages through segmentation and analysis of customer data.
The first step in creating the right message is pinpointing who exactly are your best customers. What characteristics do they share? What pain points do they have? What are their needs?
To uncover this information, use the customer data you already have to perform customer segmentation. Segmentation is the process of dividing customers into distinct groups with common needs and characteristics.
Effective customer segmentation can empower you with a granular view of the characteristics shared among your best customers, which enables you to make better decisions about how to market to them effectively. Segmentation is at the root of the best marketing campaigns because it allows marketers to target the best potential customers with the right marketing mix, as opposed to expending resources on the wrong prospects, or creating the wrong offers to the right prospects.
Once you know who you are targeting, you can evaluate the information gained from segmentation. If you have a very specific market for your product or offering, your segments may be limited to a small number of business signals, or common characteristics. If that is the case, the evaluation process will be easier because there will be fewer possible combinations of characteristics to analyze.
According to a 2015 report from Adobe, personalization was the most important area for future marketing success. Many marketers have limited information about their audience, so they’re forced to use generic messages and creative rather than addressing the unique needs of their prospective customers. Even if a prospect is likely to convert, you need to deliver a message that’s relevant to them to pique their interest enough to move down the funnel. The worst case scenario occurs when marketing works hard to get the right prospects into their CRM and then launches a spray and pray campaign, which customers often ignore.
You aren’t doing your best marketing unless you reach out to the targeted segments you create through segmentation with unique messaging tailored specifically for them. Skipping this crucial step is a waste of great prospects that are an ideal customer fit. Some marketing teams may be hesitant to embrace personalization because it sounds cumbersome to create custom campaigns for each segment. While revamping every detail of a campaign is excessive, small changes to copy and creative are enough to achieve better results. Tailoring your marketing message can be anything from involved custom marketing pieces or simple changes that take into consideration unique characteristics of the target group.
One of our own customers recently ran a marketing campaign with these techniques in mind and received great results. The customer is in the financial services sector and discovered through segmentation that they performed well with businesses on Twitter. For their next direct mail campaign, they targeted businesses on Twitter and included a Twitter logo on their creative. This was a very simple customization that spiked response rates by 200%.
A tailored message to the right prospective customers that fits a specific need is the the key to smarter marketing. Customer data takes marketing campaigns to the next level by providing the opportunity for personalization. The information is already at your disposal in your CRM – use it!
