To ensure your emails sequences are effective, you need to think carefully about the audiences you build and make sure they match up to well-thought-out segments of your market as a whole.
Create Ideal Customer Profiles
Identify your ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles) and tailor email copy to each profile. For example, imagine your offering is relevant to both IT and Marketing managers, and those positions could each be the decision-maker for your product. An IT manager and a Marketing manager have very different needs, daily concerns, and approaches to making a decision, so you wouldn’t want to write emails the same way for each of them. You want to tailor your messaging to connect with each segment.
There are several ways to segment, and some are more effective than others. In RollWorks, you use contact filters to create your audiences, which should match segments you’ve created as your ICPs.
Here are a few ways of thinking about segmentation:
Firmographic - industry, location, size, status or structure, etc. of a business.
Needs-based - what the customer needs and the job they have to get done. For example, if a company has recently raised a round of funding, you can assume they’re going to make some hires.
Value-based - a combination of needs-based/firmographic segmentation and the potential profitability and ease of serving each segment. This tends to be the most valuable and practical approach, as it helps companies focus on their most lucrative segments. It also best positions them to craft successful channel strategies to convert each segment.
Here are the steps to create value-based segments:
Establish a clear, value-based hypothesis that will guide the segmentation
Hypotheses should be clear, logical, testable, and formed around customer characteristics or factors that allow your company to clearly separate current customers into distinct value-based segments.
For example, large online e-commerce platforms use your technology because you help them reduce fraud. Or, smaller e-commerce and SaaS businesses use your promotional tools to increase traffic to their sites.
Generate customer data and insights
A list of accounts must be developed to use as a data set. Whether it's built from a billing or customer relationship management database, the list needs to be comprehensive and include all customers with the exception of trial and proof of concept accounts.
In addition, accounts that are outliers, too recent, too old, or too small (in terms of revenue or organization size) should not be included as they may erroneously influence your analysis. The overall goal here is to determine basic criteria that will create fences between customer groups.
Analyze data and group customers into “Ideal Customer Profiles”
Try defining each profile with segment-specific characteristics. For example: marketplaces that use our platform and have high web traffic, significant funding ($5 million to $50 million), and use Stripe as their payment processor.
Here is an example of several ICPs:
Evaluate the attractiveness of each segment
A formula or set of weighted criteria must be developed in order to measure the attractiveness of each micro-segment. Considerations include:
- Current size of segment, in terms of economic value
- Customer quality
- Ease of outreach to the segment
- Potential of the segment for future growth or expansion
- Fit into current business model
- Need for any significant changes within the business
- Length of sales cycle
Such a formula creates an objective measure that can consistently be used to compare and prioritize micro-segments.
Typically, the final choice of micro-segments is quite obvious. However, as markets and competitors change, it is important to continue refining each segment and identifying additional ones to ensure your company focuses on the most attractive markets.
How to segment in RollWorks to create audiences that match your most valuable ICPs
Now it’s time to apply your considerations and create audiences that match your segments. Let’s run through an example following the steps above.
In this example, you’re a marketing agency that focuses on independent medical practices.
You also know that your best experience and case studies are for dentistry practices and plastic surgery practices, and you hypothesize that your service is most relevant to bring them high-quality contacts.
You know from experience and analyzing your current and past clients that the best ones are big enough to afford your services, but you rarely get one over a certain size because they like to keep marketing in-house. Your best customers are practices that typically have between 10 and 50 employees.
The dentistry practices usually have slower marketing needs because their customer bases tend to be large, long-term, and with lower value transactions. The plastic surgeons get repeat business as well, but that repeat business is less regular and each transaction is usually a higher value. Therefore plastic surgeons are looking for a higher volume of contacts, while dentists might respond better to messaging about acquiring new, loyal, high-quality contacts.
This is your hypothesis, so you decide to create three ICPs based off this and assign them a value priority.
- Mid-sized plastic surgeons - high value
- Mid-sized dentists - high value
- Other mid-sized medical practices like ENT doctors - lower value
Here’s how you could set up an audience for each:
- Login to RollWorks and go to 'Sales Automation' > 'Contact Data' > 'Find Contacts'and click 'New Audience'
2. To create the first segment for mid-sized plastic surgeons, enter your segment title and filter by 1) Most Common Filters - Industry - “Medical” and 2) Most Common Filters - Company Size from 10 to 50 employees and 3) Most Common Filters - Company Keywords - “plastic surgery” “plastic surgeon” “beauty surgeon” “botox” and any other keywords you find relevant.
3. Now search and get the contacts you want to start with
4. Repeat steps 1 - 3 to create a new audience for the second segment, with the only difference being that the third filter will be Most Common Filters - Company Keywords - “dentist” “orthodontist” and any other relevant keywords for dental practices.
Now, create a separate email sequence for each audience and make sure it is tailored and personalized to that segment.
