Sorting through your marketing leads can present many obstacles. With a successful marketing campaign, you may find yourself overwhelmed with tons of new leads. Organizing these leads takes time to implement properly. To better organize your leads, practice lead segmentation.
What is Lead Segmentation?
Lead segmentation describes the process of breaking down all your leads into smaller groups based on common attributes. Instead of taking on all your leads at once, lead segmentation sorts them into similar piles. This allows your sales team to prioritize leads and perform presentations centered around each group.
Basically, you create groups of leads based on their similar actions. Then, you’ll sort those groups by the medium from which they found your business. You’ll also have the option to sort by lead demographics.
Other types of lead segments include:
- Existing customers from a single purchase.
- Repeat customers.
- Demographic information: age, gender, location, etc.
- Known interests.
- Low-Intent leads.
- High-intent leads.
- Homepage visitors.
- Visitors based on each product/service page.
- Repeat visitors.
- Email subscribers.
- Content downloaders.
- Shopping cart abandoners.
- Hot leads (engaged).
- Cold leads (unengaged).
How you decide to break up your lead segments depends entirely upon your own priorities. Sorting by actions, such as pages visited, allows you to tailor a marketing strategy towards those interests. For instance, if a lead views a certain product, send them offers or advertisements with that product.
These lead segmentation practices help turn massive lists into manageable, bite-sized groups. Consult with your marketing and sales teams to come up with a plan to use lead segmentation most effectively. And whenever you need help, professional consultation will prove invaluable.
Why is Lead Segmentation Important?
Why is Lead Segmentation Important?Now, taking the time to sort your leads into these individual segments takes time. Some might feel better by dealing with a huge list instead of breaking it down. However, once you put forth the effort to segment your leads, the results speak for themselves.
First and foremost, lead segmentation gives you a greater ability to handle your leads. When you have a high number of leads, your list gets disorganized quickly. This means that you might overlook many leads which may have resulted in a sale. Keeping your list organized and segmented keeps the sales process from overwhelming your teams.
Lead segmentation offers a great deal of insightful data regarding customer habits and sales prioritization. By looking at customer habits, you get a better understanding of which marketing efforts work best. When a certain advertised product attracts more customers, double down on those efforts.
Graphing customer actions shows you where customers may lose interest. You may see a large segment of customers visiting your homepage without making a purchase. In that case, you may wish to alter your homepage to draw more customers further into the sales funnel. Lead segmentation shows you the hard data of how well your marketing strategies and website perform.
Breaking down your leads into segments also informs your marketing and sales team’s approach. Different teams or team members can focus on one specific segment. This makes them experts on that segment, helping to carve a very lucrative niche in that area. From there, focus a targeted strategy catering to each segment’s interests.
Tools You Need in Your Lead Segmentation
The proper implementation of any lead segmentation strategy requires the proper tools. In the digital age, the most important tools come in the form of computer software. These tools allow for a simpler and more effective way to segment your leads into the necessary groups. Instead of spending valuable time sorting all your leads, these programs allow you to start capitalizing on them sooner.
Each specific business will need different tools to achieve its own goals. A professional consultation will help create the best possible setup for your specific business.
Here are three of the most common and useful lead segmentation tools that you simply cannot live without:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform
Whenever planning on implementing lead segmentation, you will need a CRM platform. CRM platforms act as the dashboard from which you view all customer data. Use your CRM to analyze customer actions to see which pages and advertisements they click on. This data helps determine customer habits and paths to better adapt your marketing materials.
A CRM platform greatly helps unit cohesion among your teams. With the CRM dashboards, all of your teams will have access to customer data. This allows your employees to react quickly to updated information. As a bonus, your teams will not get bogged down trying to share information between departments.
For example, a sales team might see an advertisement that attracted the lead. With this information, they will consult the marketing team to better understand that advertisement’s focus. This leads to a unique and tailored pitch more likely to result in a sale.
CRM platforms additionally allow for up-to-date information. Whenever a customer’s habits or actions shift, your teams are able to view the data. This ensures that your teams operate with as much information as possible, taking a proactive approach.
CRMs give you the power to send out specific messages to each different lead segment right from the dashboard. This all-in-one platform really forms the baseline of any lead segmentation plan. Find one with the options most geared towards your needs.
Email Marketing Software
Email marketing forms the basis of each unique marketing strategy. Make sure your marketing efforts reach the right targets. Email lists allow you to accomplish this with the highest degree of accuracy.
Email marketing software works in conjunction with a CRM platform. Therefore, choose one compatible with the CRM platform of your choice. Implement lead capture devices to collect contact information from your leads. These could include newsletters, content and deal offers.
Create an automated method to reach all of your segments on a regular basis with the right content. Send enough emails to remain prevalent in your audience’s mind. However, send too many and they will put you in their spam folders instead of their inboxes. Try your best to strike the proper balance.
Craft each email with the intention of producing a sale. Do not send emails just to remind your leads that you exist. Offer some piece of information, such as links to a new blog post or downloadable content. Your CRM platform will tell you which emails work and which need adjustment.
Email leads the way in lead nurturing. Pick a reliable email marketing platform to keep getting your message out there.
High-Converting Web Forms
Email takes precedence as the primary lead capturing device. With that in mind, capture as many email addresses from as many leads as possible. A high-converting web form means that leads readily provide contact information through the form. Your lead generation strategy means nothing if you cannot follow up on the sales journey.
Experiment with different types of web forms and lead capture devices to find the most effective ones. There is always room for improvement, so do not stop until you reach your goals.
A/B testing works well to compare variants of the same form. Show a market group or testing group two different versions of the same form to see which one they pick. Get creative and perform a tournament to find the absolute best variant out of numerous options.
Scatter lead capturing web forms throughout your website, from the landing page to the checkout page. You need to convert leads into prospects, and without contact information, you cannot continue your marketing approach effectively.
Email addresses do not simply allow you to continue the appropriate marketing campaigns. They also form the basis of creating a customer profile. You cannot properly track customer actions without the ability to link them back to the source. Build your forms to collect information from as many leads as possible.
Even information from leads with a low-intention to buy helps improve your marketing strategies.
The Two Main Categories of Lead Segments
Lead segmentation takes two primary forms. These help narrow down your focus point and clarify your groups. Each category comes with its own unique benefits.
Characteristic Segments
Characteristic segments revolve around the particular attributes of the leads themselves. You do not separate based on action but on personality profiles. These characteristics usually remain static, so you do not have to move them around. This keeps your groups from crossing over or becoming muddled.
Some examples of characteristic segments include:
- Geographic segmentation: Group membership depends on physical location.
- Demographic segmentation: Groups are divided based on age, gender, race, etc.
- Sociographic segmentation: These segments focus on socioeconomic class.
- Psychographic segmentation: Segments get divided by psychological characteristics.
- Professional segmentation: Dividing groups based on occupation.
- Firmographic segmentation: For B2B segments, divide groups based on affiliations and locations of each business.
While they provide stability, characteristic segments often create segments without an individual focus. Customer actions and preferences do not matter so much as membership to a specific group. These segments prove invaluable to many businesses but leave others wanting more.
Behavioral Segments
Behavioral SegmentsMembership to a behavioral segment depends entirely on the actions of each customer. This allows you to focus on the customer’s individual needs instead of broad group membership. This allows for more personalized marketing efforts but also requires more flexibility from your sales teams.
Some examples of behavioral segments include:
- Page visits: Which page do the leads interact with?
- Regular visitors: Visitors who visit often.
- Referral source: Where did the lead hear about your business?
- Referral message: What did the reference say to or about the lead?
- Email signups: Newsletters, ebook downloads, webinar signups, etc.
- Content categories: What kind of content do the leads view?
- Keywords: The keywords searched for by the leads before clicking on your advertisements. This segment is easiest with single keyword ad groups.
- Purchases: What did they buy?
- Multiple purchases: Repeat buyers, purchase history, etc.
- Customer experience: New customers, customer responses, customer reviews, etc.
Behavioral information helps you treat each lead with individuality. However, membership to each segment often changes with new actions. And many times you will have customers with several group attributes.
Consult with your marketing and sales teams before creating the specific segments. And always alter your segmentation process depending on results. You may find your segments too wide or too narrow. Experiment with different segmentation techniques to find the best ones.
Refine your segmentation process with direct insight from your team members. They may tell you that the group attribute contributes nothing to their sales processes. In this case, try focusing on attributes that actually help your sales teams with their sales processes.
Conclusion
Overall, lead segmentation allows for sales teams to tailor their efforts for each customer. Whether segmentation focuses around broad characteristics or specific actions, it greatly assists with lead organization.
Lead segmentation takes on a variety of forms. Some might make sense for one industry but will not work for another. Experimentation leads to the most effective lead segmentation practices. With the right tools and under the right system, lead segmentation creates sales processes with unmatched success.
However, not all businesses have the time or resources to spend on building the right lead segmentation system. Start off strong and get a jump on an otherwise taxing process by consulting a sales professional.
Selling Revolution helps your business create a phenomenal sales process tailored to your specific needs. From lead generation to talent acquisition, we have helped countless businesses reach their sales goals.
Start laying the groundwork for a more organized and successful sales-oriented business today. Schedule a no-obligation introductory call with Selling Revolution today. What are you waiting for? Join the revolution.