We’ve previously looked at the relationship between content and data to consider which is most important, and how vital both components are for a successful marketing campaign. Having great content is key so your message hits home with your target audience but without the right data, it is very likely to fall on deaf ears. Likewise, having reliable and effective data but poor content will dilute your impact and therefore your results.
Now we’ve taken a look at a similar, equally important factor that will influence the success of your marketing campaigns and that’s how you target and segment your data.
In a nutshell, the more you can niche down your audience into relevant subgroups which in turn will enable you to fine tune your content to best match their needs, the more success you will have. To obtain optimum ROI on your marketing campaigns you need to segment and target accordingly rather than just sending the same to all.
Firstly, let’s look at what’s happening in the world of email marketing and why it’s still such a powerful marketing tool.
Email Marketing Statistics
If you’re not personalising your messaging or segmenting your data, you’re already falling behind:
- Message personalisation remains the #1 tactic used by email marketers to boost performance. (HubSpot, 2024)
- Promotional emails are still the most widely used email type marketers are investing in. (HubSpot, 2024)
- Marketers who use segmented campaigns report up to a 760% increase in revenue. (Campaign Monitor, 2024)
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Audience segmentation is used by over 35% of marketers to improve engagement—up from previous years. (HubSpot, 2024)
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While Mailchimp’s detailed segmentation data (see below) dates back to 2017, more recent industry research continues to support similar or even larger improvements in engagement from segmentation.
- Segmented email campaigns saw 14.3% higher open rates.
- Click-through rates more than doubled.
- Bounce rates were 4.6% lower.
- The number of unsubscribes was 9.4% lower.
Email marketing continues to grow stronger:
- In 2024, 87% of marketers reported that email engagement had increased over the past 12 months. (HubSpot)
- In 2024, the number of global email users amounted to 4.48 billion and is projected to reach 4.73 billion users by 2026. (Statista)
- In a recent study of over 1,000 small business owners, email marketing was ranked as the second most effective channel for building brand awareness, just behind social media. (Campaign Monitor, 2024)
- Email marketing continues to deliver the highest return on investment (ROI) for small businesses, outperforming all other digital marketing channels. (Campaign Monitor, 2024)
So, it’s clear to see that email marketing is something you should be focusing on but before you start sending out your email campaigns we can’t stress enough how important it is to take the time to segment and target properly.
Segmentation
Once you’ve defined your target audience you need to segment it. We strongly recommend you segment the data to create as many individual niche audiences as you can whether that’s filtering by region, size or turnover, verticals, company or job title. This makes sure you address the right people in the right companies with the right messaging.
The more you can niche down your audience and fine-tune your content to match their needs, the more success you will have because you can then market messages in ways that each individual customer or prospect is more likely to resonate with. This will help make your message more impactful to drive results.
And by understanding your customers in more detail and targeting communications in a way that they are more receptive to, businesses can in turn increase revenue opportunities. This can also save your sales team a lot of time since they’ll have access to more detailed overviews of customers through segmentation.
Personalisation
Once segmented you need to define the message for each of your target segments. Make it personal to each contact, address their pain points in your content and how your product/service can offer a solution. For example, finance directors will have different problems that you can solve compared to operations directors, so talk directly to them about what matters to them.
A Growing Trend
It’s no surprise that the stats we looked at earlier show email is growing in popularity with the amount of people who now work remotely for at least some of their working week. This makes it even more important to recognise the influence email will have on the success of marketing strategies over the next few years.
Knowing these facts and figures isn’t enough however, it’s the actions that you take that will create the results. With the digital space so crowded it will get harder to stand out which means you need to be highly relevant infront of the right audience.
So, you’ve worked on niching down your target audience and segmenting it, what’s next…?
Data
You need to make sure you have access to your defined audience rather than just hoping that your message will resonate with your existing contacts. Marketing works better when it’s meticulously planned and thought out rather than throwing mud at the wall and hoping some sticks. It’s possible to go deep and understand exactly what you need to do to create the necessary ROI but you need to have the right tools.
That’s where i-4business comes in and our data platform. With us, you will have access to a huge breadth of choice and the platform then allows you to be incredibly precise in your campaigns – and now you know how important that is.
Not only that, our database platform allows you to be incredibly precise in your campaigns by providing the tools to enable you to drill down into your exact target audience with absolute precision.
And we’re so confident in the quality of our data and our platform that we offer a free 30-Day trial so you can see for yourself the difference high quality, compliant, and effective data can make to your success.
Take a look at our data for free with a 30-Day Free Trial Register for your free trial and get access to:
- Over 226,000+ fully GDPR compliant B2B contacts and 100+ different job roles working within every enterprise or public sector organisation across EMEA, our database platform gives you access to a huge breadth of choice.
- Data guarantees for accuracy/completeness/recency.
Plug the hole in your marketing strategy by getting access to exactly the type of contacts that you want to target.
Want to know more?
If you want to know more about how we can help with data, contact the team on
01252 367400 or enquire below
