Yesterday, I offered a few suggestions for improving conversion of prospects. Today, I want to add segmentation, messaging and offers to the discussion.
A great many organizations target a large audience (Adults, 30 to 45 years of age) and this can create situations where your messages are too generic and fail to attract a larger group of qualified buyers, and your offers are too generic to appeal to everyone. Segmentation can be easily accomplished and can improve your sales and marketing performance with little, if any additional expense.
Segmentation: Easy and Effective.
The reason for segmenting your audience is to improve your ability to serve them and increase your likelihood to convert and retain them. You can segment on a variety of factors but you want to be sure you focus on the unique needs, expectations and perceptions so you can deliver the right messages and offers.
A market segment is a group of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to have similar product and/or service needs.
A market segment should be:
- measurable
- accessible by communication and distribution channels
- different in its response to a marketing mix
- durable (not changing too quickly)
- substantial enough to be profitable
Messaging and Offers: Solutions for their Needs. Let’s say you live in Minnesota and you visit the website of Kmart or Wal-mart during January. You would probably be more interested in winter related products – jackets, sweaters, snow blowers, shovels.
But what if you lived in Arizona? You have little if any interest in cold weather gear or snow removal. (Well, having lived in Arizona, you tend to have a rather twisted interest in these things – especially when you have family dealing with that cold weather and you’re sitting by your pool enjoying the sun…but that’s another story.)
Or what if you are a college or university. Prospective students will have a wide variety of factors that will impact their decision to enroll at your institution or with another.
Knowing what the individual values allows you to provide relevant benefits. If the prospective buyer is interested in ‘status’, you address those needs differently than ‘economy’ or ‘quality’.
And why offer discounts to those that aren’t motivated by price – alright, to those not as motivated by price as others.
In higher education, some prospective students are interested in the learning experience (“What’s an online course like?”) and others are interested in speed to completion (“How many of my credits will be accepted into your program?”). Some will be more interested in social activities (“How many student tickets can I buy for the basketball season?”) and others are more interested in internships and study abroad opportunities.
The challenge for many organizations is managing the options and being able to deliver the right content to the right person in an economic manner. Fortunately, technology can help.
When it comes to printed material, variable printing has come a long way and offers an affordable way for your organization to deliver relevant, personalized content in a timely manner. I was fortunate to have worked in the catalog industry back in the early 1990′s and worked with RR Donnelley. Our company used variable printing to personalize catalogs and it had tremendous impact that easily covered the added cost.
Later, I worked with Barry Blau Direct Marketing on the Bermuda Department of Tourism account – and we used a much more elaborate variable print solution that had equally dramatic (positive) impact on response rates and trips booked.
Today, you have more options that can be used with printed material – and then there are the wonders of the online world which pretty much limits you to your own expertise in technology. Customized, data-driven microsites and email messages driven by the data captured by your sales staff during conversations with prospects and customers can deliver a much higher response/purchase rate than generic messages.
So how will your organization identify the unique needs of the individual and provide them with relevant, timely responses that motivate them to buy from your organization? Or will you continue to treat everyone the same and hope that the easier, generic approach will be more appealing than what your competition is doing?
