The Email Segmentation That Every B2B Tech Startup Needs

According to the Direct Marketing Association, segmented emails drive 58% of all revenue attributed to email marketing.

In other words, unless you prioritize email segmentation with your email marketing campaigns, your email results will only achieve about 42% of their true potential.

So with this in mind, what kinds of segmentation should B2B tech startups be leveraging?

Buyer’s Journey Stage

Do you know where a particular contact is in their active research process between surfacing a goal or challenge and committing to a purchase?

If so, be sure to use a Buyer Persona contact property (Awareness, Consideration, Decision) to create email lists that you can use in your email marketing campaigns.

This way, you’ll be able to send contextually relevant email messages to the right person at the right time.

Industry

How many different industries does your company sell to?

Does each industry have different reasons for engaging with your company?

Do you have separate email campaigns and goals for stakeholders from different industries?

If so, create email lists or segments based on a contact’s Industry property.

Job Role

Different people within the company can have wildly different goals and challenges, and motivations for investing in your product or service.

Within this situation, you’d likely communicate quite differently with a chief financial officer (CFO) then you would with a help desk manager.

To make this a reality, make sure that you have an easy way to segment your contacts by job role.

From a practical standpoint, you’ll likely need more of a dropdown list contact property strategy for Job Role rather than allowing free-form text write-ins for job titles.

Language

Do all of your prospects and customers speak English? Or do some speak another language?

Suppose your email messaging needs to be language-relevant for the recipient, and you’re routinely sending messages in other languages. In that case, you’ll need a contact property that either explicitly or implicitly captures Language and uses this to auto-populate email lists for Language.

Lifecycle Stage

As the first cousin of Buyer’s Journey Stage, Lifecycle Stage is another way of categorizing and segmenting contacts based on where they are in their lifecycle with your company.

The distinction between the two taxonomies comes down to Buyer’s Journey being more buyer-driven and the Lifecycle Stage being more seller-centric.

Location

If your prospects and customers are spread across multiple time zones, perhaps even multiple countries or continents, you should use Location as another email segmentation strategy.

In addition, if your company has a brick-and-mortar presence where certain kinds of customers (and prospects) would be more likely to do business with their closest location of yours, this would be another strong use case for using a Location contact property to drive geographic email lists.

Recent Behavior

Finally, use marketing automation software that provides double-duty as your email service provider and perhaps even integrates with your content management system (CMS). You’ll have excellent visibility into recent behaviors of known contacts.

For example, you may want to create email segments based on recent email opens or click-throughs, website visits, form submissions, or specific page views.



What email lists or segmentation strategy is more critical for your B2B tech startup? Let me know in the comments section.