Everybody Is Not The Same: Basic Ways to Segment Your Database

Hello, Ms. Small Biz Gal.  You've built yourself a pretty nice database there.

You have a good clean list, you are recording basic info like important milestone dates (first date of contact, first transaction, last transaction, birth dates, anniversaries, etc.).  You can tell the difference between prospects and actual customers, and you can, in some ways, record sales to your customers.  (You're awesome, by the way - and miles ahead of lots of your peers.)

Let's say, for the sake of this post, that you're contacting all these folks via email, although this is valid for any of your channels in which you talk directly to customers.

Hypothetically, you're going to tell them about a great new deal you have going - you're going to give a discount to new customers. This is what you want to send:

Hello, new customers!  We're so excited about the opportunity to add you to our family, we'd love to offer you 10% off your next purchase with Ms. Small Biz, Inc! Offer expires in a week, so hurry in - we can't wait to see you!

Is this the right thing to send... to the entire database?  If you think about it, you know the answer - which is NO, of course not.  This is only good for your prospect list!

So why are you sending this out to customers that aren't prospects?  How do you avoid making this mistake?

The simplest answer is to use a very basic database segmentation.  And here it is:

Of course, for your business, what a "new" customer might mean may be slightly different, and the same with "lapsed".  And of course, you can sub-segment each group any number of ways, if you have the time, tools, and strategy to manage that complexity well.

In our hypothetical case, the email above can be sent to the prospects only, and not the rest of the group.   Simple.

Lots of people violate this every day, by not taking the time to create the basic segmentation above - I'm always surprised as I get this from people I think should know better (aka, other marketers).

Truly, without this basic segmentation, it can make your direct marketing far less effective.

So, Ms. Small Biz, take a moment and assign the segmentation to your database as noted above, and keep it up as you onboard new customers and as their status changes (yes, there are tools for this).

Need help?  I can do that, y'know.  Let me know!  Drop me an email!