Chapter 7
Segmenting
The first message you send to prospective customers is absolutely crucial, so this first-touch e-mail needs to work in your favor. The only way to personalize your messaging in a scalable manner is to get really good at segmenting your lists. This allows you to hit a full list with a note that is tailored to all of them yet is still fairly general.
Here's an example of how a company called The Storefront used segmenting to properly personalize their message at scale.
The Storefront was a marketplace for pop-up shops and short-term retail rentals. When it opened in cities across the United States, The Storefront needed to market its services to both landlords and retailers, so it found websites in which the contact details for landlords (Yelp, Tripadvisor) and for retailers (Etsy, Kickstarter) were listed.
The Storefront then used Import.io to extract all contact details from the websites into neatly ordered lists, which it could export into Google Docs. When The Storefront extracted contact details, it also extracted as much additional information about the leads as possible. The Storefront used this additional information to further segment lists so that it could create message templates that generated highly personalized messages for each lead.
One way The Storefront segmented the lists was by neighborhood. When it was building the list for New York City retail spaces, The Storefront scraped space listings from Yelp. This gave it all the contact information it needed and also grouped the leads by neighborhood. By pulling this information, The Storefront could put together a personalized template geared toward companies in specific areas of New York City, like Soho or Tribeca.
The Storefront would send an e-mail to the companies with a mention of the neighborhood they were in and the other stores in that neighborhood that were already listing on The Storefront. This made the message feel a lot more personal to the store owner, but it was still a mass message sent in an e-mail campaign. For example, an e-mail would say, “We've been running pop-up shops with store owners in [neighborhood] successfully for over two years now. Your neighbors [Store1] and [Store2] are also utilizing the marketplace to rent out their spaces.”
The message seems personalized, but all of the information was pulled from the CSV (comma separated values) file that The Storefront created. Nothing had to be manually filled in. This is the power of careful segmenting.
Figure 7.1 Store Fronts
Where to Start Segmenting
Once you have lists, contact information, and some research, you should have a good idea of how to segment your lists. First separate out all of the leads for which you have warm introductions. Using the tools mentioned in previous chapters, you should be able to figure out which accounts you can get introduced to. That's probably your best way in.
Next, you can take a look at where you pulled the lists. For example, if you scraped the list of companies that sponsored at Dreamforce, it is already a well-segmented list. You can use the fact that they sponsored at Dreamforce in your message. In an e-mail to this full list, you can say something like, “Companies that sponsor Dreamforce see X value with our product” or “I really enjoyed chatting with the reps in your booth at Dreamforce and I would love to continue the conversation.” This gives it some personalization, but it requires that you segment your lists properly.
Again, the deeper you can segment your lists, the more personal you can get while still contacting multiple companies. If I took the Dreamforce list and then pulled out the companies on the list that perform a certain service, I have a list that's even more targeted. Hence, my messaging could emphasize that they were at Dreamforce and also performed a certain service, making the message look more personalized than before, while still hitting numerous companies.
Start playing with other reasons to segment your lists based on alerts, triggers, or how you built the lists in the first place.
I recently met with an e-commerce company out of Singapore called TradeGecko. TradeGecko was getting plenty of inbound e-mails from e-cigarette companies that wanted to use their back-end inventory management software. By using this information, TradeGecko was able to build a list of e-cigarette distributors in the United States and the United Kingdom for its first outbound messaging sales campaign. This was a well-defined list with a targeted message, and it had a high success rate for them. TradeGecko segmented on location and industry, but you can experiment.
Since this was TradeGecko's first outbound campaign, it did not have results to compare the campaign to; however, TradeGecko was blown away by the response. Over 50 percent of the e-cigarette companies TradeGecko had reached signed up for a free trial of TradeGecko.
Deeper segmentation allows you to be more targeted with your messaging, leading to fewer spam complaints and higher positive response rates. It is extremely important to make sure you're sending e-mails that will elicit a positive response. Doing this at scale is both a science and an art that can be mastered.
With new changes to their InMail policy, even LinkedIn is finally rewarding people for contacting people the right way. LinkedIn has said:
InMail credits will be returned for every response, rather than for no response: InMail messages that get any response (Reply or Not Interested) from a recipient within 90 days will be credited back to you. If you don't get a response within 90 days, however, the InMail credit will not be replaced.
There aren't very many tools I've found that will strictly help with segmenting lists. It's a very intuitive process that is up to you to decipher. It isn't hard, but the more you can think through the possibilities and further segment your lists, the easier it will be to personalize messages at scale.
But What about Whales?
Here's the last point about segmenting lists for companies with a large average deal size or big partnerships.
Take the top accounts, maybe the top 10 percent or 100 accounts that you want to access and have really good information on, and e-mail them with strong, targeted e-mails. Save the mass e-mailing for the rest of your accounts. For these big deals, you want to be spot-on and authentic. Provide value, and really get them attracted from the beginning.
Sometimes, if you're lucky, your low-hanging fruit and whales will overlap. I was working with a company looking to go after companies with corporate learning and development budgets. The companies in this space were types like General Electric, Levis, and Coca-Cola, each of which spends millions per year on internal training. All I had to do was visit the competitors' websites that listed case studies and quotes. Not only did we know the company had a budget and was allocating it in this way, but by observing who the quotes came from, we also were able to get the buyer's name and title at that company.
Figure 7.2 Bagging Six Figure Deals
These leads would be in what I consider the top 10 percent.
Visit www.SalesHacker.com/library for more information on finding contact information, conducting lead research, and segmenting your lists.