The importance of having a segmented database

are you one of those who segment your marketing actions or do you do the same for everyone? Not 100% of your contacts are the same, nor do they have the same needs. Therefore, it is advisable that you analyse, identify and group the profiles of those contacts that match the characteristics and may need your products or services. However, do you have to check that each contact, one by one, meets X requirements? The answer is NO. HubSpot already does it for you through its active lists so that only contacts join each time they meet the criteria and leave when they no longer meet them. Or if you prefer, create your static list for a specific group of contacts that you need to monitor on a specific date.

Make sure that the contacts you send the email campaign to are always the ones that meet the requirements.

why segment your database?

It all starts with the definition of your buyer persona (who is your potential customer, what are their goals and concerns, where do they look for information, what do they need, etc.). Once you are clear, you can optimise your efforts and start segmenting your audience according to their demographic, geographic or behavioural characteristics. It would make no sense to attract those who don't need you. Look for the chemistry!

You must segment to..

• Attract potential customers. Those who need you.
• Get to know their behaviour and interests in depth, which will allow you to carry out more specific marketing actions (valuable content, blog posts, dissemination on social networks, email marketing campaigns...).
• Create the ideal content to nurture them, which will attract them because it will be in tune with their purchase cycle, where customers are in the process (flywheel) and are no longer the result (funnel).
• Improve the user experience. The customer will feel identified with the content provided by the company, it will help them understand their problems or needs and they will probably move on to the consideration phase to look at some solutions.

All this, delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Are you ready to start segmenting your database?

Get to know your contacts and create a segmented database

Delivering the right message means nothing. Delivering it at the right time and to the right person can mean a lot: new sales opportunities and new customers loyal to your brand. To get to this point, you first need to know the visitors and contacts that are registered in your database. And now the best part starts: Segmentation!

To start the lead nurturing process you must know (and update) the situations of each of your prospects. Knowing them is not as complicated as it seems, you just have to take your database and create groups that have a number of characteristics in common (geographic location, professional profile, age ...). Little by little all the tactics that you carry out within your Inbound Marketing strategy will be facilitated.

The characteristics in common cannot be just any characteristics, but strong and important points that increase the value of the database. Make sure that the list has enough differentiating factors, because this will determine the affinity of a much more detailed segmentation. All your contacts should be organised according to the type of interest they have shown in receiving marketing emails from you.

Many companies have already achieved this thanks to Inbound agencies that work with HubSpot.

how are you going to clean up your contact list?

Well, at this point you should use any of these contact properties to know more details, get more context, the reason for their interaction with the company, etc. For example: recent conversion date, creation date, date of last email, last form submission, last response, last purchase date..

These properties are where data about your contacts is stored, such as the first page they visited and their email address. In short, it's key information. Other key data includes: their annual revenue, the date they became a customer in the lifecycle, or a qualified sales opportunity for marketing and sales, the city they live in, the name and size of their company, etc.

As an Inbound agency, we believe that the information you store on your customers and sales opportunities is the most valuable asset you have in your company. Now that you have the ability to segment based on data, you should not lose sight of this opportunity. Prospecting, follow-up and strategy results will depend on it.

Marketing automation has brought the possibility of segmenting customers and working with marketing successfully. From this process arise actions such as working workflows for each customer segmentation or working a newsletter per buyer persona.

Conclusions of the segmentation of your databases

Segmenting your database is important for your marketing campaigns to give good results. Reaching the ideal customer profile at the right time and with the right message is also important. For example, by segmenting your email campaigns you can send a single campaign to the entire database and optimise your results! Your commandments now are: "Segment your database and send it to the right customer at the right time and with the right message":

1. You will improve your results above all things.
2. You will not take your contacts' information in vain.
3. You will build customer loyalty.
4. You will save time and improve your performance.
5. You will honour your database.
6. You will not do the same marketing actions for everyone if it is not appropriate.
7. Stand out from the competition.
8. Segment by demographics, behaviour and performance.
9. Draw conclusions.
10. Measure results.

"Make the customer the hero of your story" - Ann Handley.