We’ve all heard by now the effects that email segmentation can have on an online business. But what about businesses that sell products to other businesses? What if you have a long list of people that are business owners, or marketers, or CEO’s of corporations? You might think to yourself why would I send them the same cheesy cart abandonment email? Or another “we missed you” email. They wouldn’t even look at it right?
Well today we want to show you how you can bring value to each segment of your B2B subscribers.
1) Seniority Level
A lot of online businesses have a sales strategy and a content strategy. And a lot of times these two strategies target two different audiences. So a company like that could really use email segmentation to differentiate those two audiences which would boost their sales and make their content more efficient by bringing it to the right segment of the audience.
Let’s take eClincher as an example, they are a social media management tool that sells to social media managers in large companies, as well as offers a lot of varied marketing content for entrepreneurs. They should make two lists, one targeting social media managers, and one targeting the young entrepreneurs. That way they could offer their agency product to the large companies, and boost their sales.
2) Content Topic
Sometimes the differences in an audience are less visible than in the last example. Sometimes a business writes about a few different topics, may be offering a few related products per topic. If they use email segmentation they could target the group of people that are interested in each topic.
For example, PurrTraffic is marketing and social media that offers…you guessed it! Marketing and Social media and SEO services as well. Like a lot of the small marketing firms they try to broaden their services offering in order to get more customers and get their foot in the door.
So what PurrTraffic could do is to divide its list into the topics that people are most interested in. That way they could send an email about SEO to all the people that are interested in that topic, and target their with their SEO product or service. They could do the same for the social media enthusiasts.
3) Content Format
In a research study conducted by HubSpot 43% of the people they asked wanted see more video content. And as we all know HubSpot has its main CRM product as well as a very popular Inbound Marketing Certification they offer. The certification offers free video courses that result in a nice little certificate that you can put on your LinkedIn profile to spice it up a bit.
Iff HubSpot wanted to get more participants in its video courses it would need to make a segment of their email list that is more interested in video content. That would mean people that click more often on email that contain video, or that have viewed articles on their site or blog that have video on them, or simply the people that have clicked on anything that relates to the certificate program.
If you are targeting B2B customers and have a content strategy as well, chances are you have more than one type of audience that buys your product and subscribes to your emails. You can easily use email segmentation in the 3 ways that we have presented – by sorting your audience by seniority level, content format, and content type, to boost your sales and get more customers.
Have you tried these before? Let us know in the comment section below.
