Database Segmentation

Database segmenting is the process of creating individual lists or groups based on select criteria. For example, marketing can create a list of contacts in a certain industry that have interacted with your company in the past 6 months.

Segmentation is organizing your database by grouping together contacts and companies based on specific characteristics. Everyone at a company can leverage segmentation. Marketing can use it to determine outreach and to tailor communications. A sales team can use it to prioritize the best-fit leads.

Benefits of Segmentation

Whilst the benefit of segmentation for the customer is about addressing their needs better than the competition, there are many benefits for the organisation too.

>>Firstly, you will reduce your marketing costs by only targeting real prospects.

>>Being more specific about who you are addressing and the benefit you are offering will make it easier to reach that target market.

>>The marketing will be more effective and will help build a relationship with the customer. In time you will create loyalty, i.e. customer retention, and, eventually, advocacy.

For segmentation to be effective the identified group must be distinct, tangible and accessible. You also need to be sure there is a competitor for the group. There would be no point in reducing your price to attract a particular group if your product is already the cheapest.

How to segment your database

There are multiple ways you can segment your database. Some of the most common include source channel, time, first-touch content, product, ideal customer profile and buyer persona.

>>Source channel

Source channel is how a contact arrived on your site. Did they come in through organic? Were they a referral? Did they engage with a paid ad? Segmenting by how you acquired a contact can help you determine which areas of your marketing warrant further investment and which are less effective.

If you’re using a marketing analytics ool like HubSpot, source channel is easy to track and just needs to be associated with the contact record in your CRM.

>>First-touch content

When a contact engaged with your company, what was the first piece of content they interacted with? While source channel indicates how a customer was brought to your site, first-touch content is what they saw when they arrived. 

In order to segment by first-touch content, you’ll need your marketing automation platform to be integrated with your CRM and set up property or field mappings between the two..

>>Time 

Segmenting by time can help you determine if there was a specific campaign or seasonal event that led to a contact’s conversion — and understand how contacts who converted through such events perform over time. Segmenting your customers by time can also give you insight into retention trends.

The time when a contact converted should be automatically recorded in your CRM.

>>Product

If you have multiple products or multiple product tiers, segmenting your database by which one a contact is using can help your customer marketing team send contextually relevant communications.

Which product a customer purchased should be documented as part of the sales process when a deal closes.