Your Email Content Is Only As Effective As Your Contact Segmentation

When it comes to MSP marketing, segmenting your contact list should be step one of the process. First and foremost, you want your contacts to get the most relevant and valuable content. 88% of marketers believe segmentation to be a key element impacting customer focus. If you prioritize this, you will naturally be rewarded with higher open rates, click-through rates and ultimately, a higher conversion rate. In fact, the click-through and open rate of the segmented campaign is 101% and 14.3% more than that of non- segmented campaigns respectively.

Here are a few (not all) different ways to segment your lists:

Company Type/Stage:
The very basic differentiation you will want to make is between Prospect vs. Customer. You may offer your customers special promotions or upsell opportunities that won’t apply to your prospects and vice versa. You will market your services and expertise to prospects, but this is of course not appropriate to send to your customers. If you like to get more granular and market to each stage in the sales cycle, go for it!

Industry:
Say you provide a service such as electronic file sharing. While this product may apply across the board, sending out an email campaign that has personalized language referencing their industry type will help the recipient see more value in what you are offering.

Interest:
While this may overlap with industry at the very core, you can also segment a contact list based on what product service they are most interested in. Say you attend a Microsoft expo and you gather a list of contacts. You will not want to promote a conflicting service or product to these contacts. If they attended a Microsoft conference, you already know their interest so jump on it!

Behavior:
Another great way to segment your lists is based on a given behavior a contact displays. For example, if a contact attends your webinar on cybersecurity, gather all attendees into a separate list to which you will send cybersecurity related information, alerts, and services. Another way is to build a list of contacts that perform certain online activities such as opening a specific email or clicking on a specific link. This can help narrow contacts who are interested in a given topic so that you can continue to send them related or follow up content.

You can segment by any of these qualities as well as overlapping a few such as “Industry A Prospects interested in Product 1.”

Summary
Contact segmentation is a critical step before you begin your marketing campaigns. At the very least, start with the basics of company type or sales stage so that you are sending appropriate content to all of your contacts. Getting more granular with industry and interest only helps your content become more relevant, helping your company to make sales faster!

  Laura Estes is a Marketing and Sales Enablement Consultant at Mindmatrix, which draws her strong background in content creation, social media, digital marketing and communication skills.