The power of email is driven by the fact that virtually every business with more than a handful of employees uses it. In the B2B environment, email usage is far less dependent on age groups and particular interests than any of the social media platforms.
However, this doesn’t mean that the messages you send can be the same for everyone. Here are 3 scenarios where our marketing team use segmentation to full effect.
Filling a seminar
Pre-pandemic, we loved a good seminar! Taking a break from emailing at scale to get face-to-face with our audience and chew over a key topic.
2 years on, we’re embracing live events once again. In order to make them accessible and focused on adding genuine value, we don’t charge people to attend. The flip side of this approach is that there’s only so far people will travel when their money isn’t on the line, so in this case, we segment by geography. In our CRM, the most efficient way to do this is using postcodes:
Of course, if a marketer from Dundee or Dublin does want to come, we won’t prevent them! It’s just not a good use of effort to chase them too hard with direct invitations.
Following the tech
From our perspective of serving businesses across a range of industries, one of the most fascinating things is how common some challenges are. Recruiters, interior designers, and universities all want to identify who’s visiting their websites, and improve the engagement rate of their emails to warm leads.
The real divides among our audience come from the tech and tools they use in pursuit of these noble aims. When they’re using a competitor we can play on our better Account Management and powerful deliverability tools to persuade them to upgrade.
We also target campaigns based on the CRM that’s in use. We can get into the nuts and bolts of widely-used tools like Microsoft Dynamics, or point out situations where we have an exclusive integration.
Optimising for the Org chart
The average B2B “buying group” (those who need to sign off on a new tech purchase) has now grown to 8 people. It’s not just the Marketing Director or CMO we need to convince, but the Sales Director, Finance Director, and in Spotler’s case, the Head of IT. And they’ll all want different things! Marketing will focus on how easy it is to use, IT needs to understand how it will link to existing systems, etc. etc. etc.
All of which is to say that you should absolutely be addressing these issues at every opportunity. Lean on your Sales and Onboarding teams to understand who is in your sector’s “buying group”, then start warming them up with your early outreach emails. You can even take this a step further and create content specifically for these people.
The other approach is to move vertically down the org chart; the Marketing Director might be the one with sign-off power, but the Marketing Manager and Marketing Executive will be the ones spending more time with our product. If we can get them on board, they may act as “internal champions”; flagging the issues and challenges that come from doing the actual day-to-day work.
Go forth and divide!
In this blog, we’ve deliberately focused on quite high-level segmentation. This is to highlight the fact that everyone both can and should be doing it. Once you’ve seen the benefits, we hope that you’ll be inspired to break your audience down even further. You could target by industry, or do a general sales push to a specific area (create a case study for a customer in Exeter and send it to all leads within 10 miles).
Ready to use the platform that makes segmentation a breeze? Book a slot with one of our sales team here.
