Menu

segmentation

Not Segmenting Your Data? Turn in Your Gun & Badge

by Leave a Comment

"Market segmentation is a natural result of the vast differences among people."

– Donald Norman (author of “The Design of Everyday Things” – excellent read! I’ll never look at doors the same way again.)

Donald nailed it when it comes to customer segments. Your customers are all unique. They all have their own interests and motivations for looking at your product and service offerings. You (hopefully) use your analytics data to gain insights for improving marketing initiatives. So why wouldn’t you arrange your data in a manner that captures these differences in motivation and behavior? Analysis of all-encompassing data can yield some interesting sticking points, however it can just as easily mislead you with regards to customer behavior.

What Can Be Done to Avoid This?

As marketing professionals and analysts, it is our duty to get to the information that leads to more effective campaigns. So if you haven’t considered segmenting your data, here are four steps to take to get it done in your web analytics tools.

  1. Look at your high-level offerings. Before jumping into the creation of segments in your solution, it is a good idea to take a few steps back. First look at your organization from a high level. What are the core service and product offerings of your organization? How do your target audience and customer demographics align with these service offerings? This information will give you the foundation on which to base your analytics customer segments. If you already have this figured out, great! Move on to the next step.

  2. Identify touch-points with your customer segments. Now that you know who your customer segments are, it’s time to determine how your analytics solution will identify them. For this, you’ll want to identify how they are discovering your brand. In the case of web analytics, are customers in a particular segment arriving via search engines (organic or paid)? If so, what search phrases did they use? What landing pages did they use? Use the trending you see with these questions to create the rules for each segment.

  3. Create your segments! You’ve identified your segments and how you can find them in your analytics data. Now it’s time to set up these rules in your solution. In the case of Google Analytics, set up the proper Include rules using Regular Expressions for related search phrases and landing pages.

  4. Make sure the segments actually work! At this point you may have put some significant time and effort into creating these customer segments. Don’t let all of that hard work go to waste. Make sure it separates and organizes your data properly. Test them with different date ranges to ensure the results are somewhat consistent and make sense.

As modern day analysts and marketers, most of us do our best not to think in silos. This mentality should translate over when it comes to data analysis. Though some questions may warrant looking at high-level, all-encompassing data, the best insights will come from segmentation. Adapting these tips to your own process should help you discover hidden gems for converting more customers.

Have some other helpful tips for segmentation of data? Feel free to leave a comment and share the wealth! Also be sure to follow us on Twitter (link to the right) to stay up to date on the latest tips for better analysis.

Keyword Research to Improve Email Marketing Effectiveness

by Leave a Comment

In the internet marketing environment, we have access to a lot of information about our existing customers as well as prospective customers. Keyword research provides information on terms and phrases that are relevant to a specific audience, but demographic and geographic information should also be leveraged to improve effectiveness of email marketing campaigns and promotions. By leveraging and testing keyword research, you can create more targeted campaigns, be more efficient with your message, and improve overall conversion rates.

Segmentation of Email Campaigns based on Keyword Research

The segmentation of email campaigns beyond demographic information can include segmenting by sales process, customer lifecycle, etc. You can use keyword research to align with your segmentation strategy and deliver keywords-rich content to relevant demographics such as Female/Male or by State. Several keyword research tools such as Ispionage, SpyFu, Ad Intelligence, Google Insights, and Google Keyword Tool can provide valuable insights into keyword trends by age, geographic locations, and other demographic information.

Keyword Targeting with Subject Line Testing

Email Marketing is still an effective tactic which should include keywords that are consistent with your SEO campaign. Implementing relevant and targeted keywords that are not only consistent with your products/services, but also with your demographics and geographic locations, will help to improve open rates, click-through rates, sharing of emails, lead generation, lower cost per acquisition, and increase profit margins. The most interesting opportunity for keyword insertion into Email Marketing is within the subject line and content of the email. The ability to implement keywords into the subject line should improve your open rates as long as the keywords are relevant to the desired target audience. In some cases, email software providers can implement subject line testing to improve the open rates and test new keywords within the subject line (as seen in the Image Below).

Content Strategies by Segmentation

Based on the information that’s available for keyword research, you can develop and test content strategies based on keyword research and trends. For example, Table 1 above shows the keyword “home mortgage loan” for females between the ages of 25-34 as being consistent with the audience. By implementing keywords and content, the likelihood of the content being read, as well as its click-through rates, social media sharing, and conversions, will increase.

More Insight into What Works by Segment

If you’re running a SEO or Pay per Click campaign, it’s important to leverage this information and not “reinvent the wheel.” Some of this information is accessible via Google Analytics, WebTrends, Omniture, etc., but you need to differentiate what works and what does not. Don’t just stop at the conversion itself. Look into the segments, subject lines, and content that are leading to quotes, leads, and sales. It is recommended that you simplify the reporting to more clearly align the campaigns, keywords, segments, and content strategies with completed actions on the website or within the email campaigns themselves.