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Read MoreNow It’s Personal! The Importance of Database Segmentation
Defining and segmenting your target market is a crucial step when writing out a business plan, so why isn’t it focused on more when we segment our online databases?
The Importance of Database Segmentation For Digital Marketing
Defining and segmenting your target market is a crucial step when writing out a business plan, so why isn’t it focused on more when we segment our online databases?
Most website and email marketing platforms simply gather all of the members that have filled out your webforms and bundle them all together so your only option is to send out your marketing materials in bulk.
How Should I Segment My Database?
Segmenting your audience specifically based on their behaviour when interacting with your website makes it easy to send meaningful, personalised marketing material. The more customised the marketing material is, the more your customers feel that you care about them, which makes them reflect more positively on your brand.
Common ways of segmenting your audience are:
- How they interact with the website (Visiting certain pages, staying on the website for a specific amount of time, pressing certain buttons etc.)
- How they interact with your products (Segmentation by type of item purchased, abandoning full carts and repeat buyers)
- By user group (Company, age, time since joined etc.)
A good example of correct database segmentation would be setting up a rule to automatically send out a short reminder email to people who have added items to their cart, but not purchased them, 2 days after they have left their cart. This gives customers who didn’t fulfil their purchase a second chance to come back to the site and continue where they left off.
Another example would be to create a list of everyone who has purchased a specific product within the last 6 months but haven’t purchased anything since, so you can send them related products that they may be interested in.
How Do I Automate Segmentation?
The the most difficult part about segmenting your database would be the time it takes to search, filter and store the different segmentations. The possibilities and combinations of database segmentations are seemingly endless and creating multiple different lists can be very time consuming.
Email marketing software generally give you the option to filter users into groups depending on which forms they will out, but unless they have a powerful automation engine built-in, this is as far as you can go in terms of automated database segmentation.
Your website software and email marketing software need to be integrated together in order to do this, so the options are either pay a developer to integrate the two systems, input all of the data manually or have an all-in-one CMS/e-mail marketing system that can easily link the data together. Oncord is an example of these all-in-one systems.
Why Should I Segment My Databases?
Sending out blanket emails to all of your customers can be useful for things like alerts, newsletters and important updates that you’d like your whole audience to see, but it isn’t the only answer for your digital marketing. The more specific you can get when targeting your marketing campaigns, the more positive your results will be.
Behaviour-based database segmentation is the future of digital marketing. The more specific and less intrusive your marketing is, the more positive your response will be. The average open rate for marketing emails sits at around 22%, whereas context-based autoresponders have an open rate of close to 50%. Setting up behaviour-based marketing emails can increase your open rates by finding a sweet spot between a blanket marketing email and a context-based autoresponder.
In Conclusion
Creating these kinds of rules sounds really difficult and time consuming, but having an integrated system is a much easier process for you. You will end up saving a lot more time using an automated process than you would setting it all up manually, plus once it is all set up you won’t have to re-do it every month.
Database segmentation makes it easy for you to get the most out of your online marketing by cutting out a lot of the grey area. You can see exactly what works and can refine your digital marketing to maximise ROI and make it easier on your customers by giving them exactly what they want from your website.
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