The Best Ways to Slice Your CRM Database for Better Email List Segmentation

Do you find capturing data in CRM fun? Truth be told, cleaning and tidying your CRM database is something many of us dread.

No matter how daunting it may sound, it is crucial to manage your CRM data as it assesses the effectiveness of your marketing and sales strategy, which further influences marketing decision-making in the future.

But if you’re having to grapple with a messy CRM database, how can you be sure you’re using your data effectively?

This is a big question. And, the answer often lies in how well your email lists are segmented, which brings us to the title of this article. Let’s see several ways of slicing and dicing your CRM data for better email list segmentation, along with the importance of lead segmentation that can surely boost your ROI.

Why is Lead Segmentation Important?

In today’s era, the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. You need to make your customers feel special if you want to amp up your sales. For this, a generic email won’t work. This is where lead segmentation comes in.

As lead segmentation divides your leads into smaller lists, it allows you to send personalized and highly-tailored emails to your leads. It further leads to better conversions, a robust marketing strategy, and faster purchase time.

Smart Ways to Slice Your CRM Database for Better Email List

Consider the following tactics to slice your CRM database for a better email list.

Demographics

Demographics is one of the easiest ways to divide your target audience into different groups. It includes parameters such as gender, age, education, title, income level, or industry, which help in delivering highly-customized content. For example, you might want to segment your database into a small company group and a large Company Group.

When you do this, you will be able to apply different rules to trim down the number of people on your list for each group, depending on what the challenges are for each segment. For instance, US-based employees would have the emails sent from a different sender than international employees would.

Sales Funnel

Knowing where your prospect is in the sales funnel is another key point in segmentation. It helps you understand what people are interested in and how they progress through your sales process.

For example, you might want to have separate segments for buyers who have finished the first stage of your sales funnel and ones who are still in the initial stages. Or you might want to have separate segments for leads that have been emailed by a salesperson and those that have yet to have interacted with the salesperson.

Customers’ Interests

Nowadays, customers have different interests. So, you must keep track of how customers engage with your content.

For example, customers who have downloaded your white paper will be interested in hearing about new offerings. Those who haven’t downloaded your white paper may not be as interested in hearing about new content.

Or, people who tend to click on CTAs on latest designs and products might be interested in End of Season sale announcements.

Purchase Pattern

Patterns such as past purchases, buying frequency and product interests is one of the most effective ways of segmenting your email list as it provides a better understanding of the buyer journey for your customers.

You might want to segment your email list in terms of the number of days between purchase and email. This will allow you to understand how much time you have between each stage of the sales funnel.

Abandoned Cart

Segment your database in CRM data to understand what triggers a customer to abandon the sales funnel. For example, if you receive an email request to unsubscribe, then you can understand which email triggered the unsubscribe request.

This is a great way to gain an understanding of how your subscribers feel about the emails or perhaps where they struggle with the content of emails. Segmenting data in this way will also allow you to improve your sales funnel and build strong relationships with your customers.

Satisfaction Index

Customer experience is extremely important. To improve your user experience, you need to know if your customers are satisfied with your products and services.

Once you know who is interested in your content and that they have a good understanding of that group, then you can weigh the data differently for each group. For example, you might want to calculate a ‘satisfaction index’ for each subscriber, which means that the satisfaction won’t have any effect on what gets selected for a more personalized email.

Or, you can ask NPS questions such as – “On a scale of 0-10, how do you like our product/service?”, or, “How likely are you to recommend our product/service to your friends and family?”

Clicking Habits

Along with understanding the preferences of your customers, you need to know their clicking habits. For example, which links in your emails are clicked on most frequently.

Once you’ve analyzed information for different subscribers, you’ll be able to segment the links in your emails based on how many times they have been clicked. You can also use this information to determine what content is more popular than others and how your audience interacts with email campaigns. This gives marketers the power to design emails that align with their subscribers’ interests.

Wrapping Up

Segmenting your CRM data in this way is a great way to take your email marketing program to the next level. Remember, if you don’t segment your database effectively then you could run into some major issues like:

• Mailing too many people that are not interested in your brand
• Sending out the wrong messages
• Incurring high costs with low response rates

It’s also important to remember to segment data from your CRM every month and include it in the process of your email marketing strategy. By using this approach, you’ll be able to better understand which emails to send and which subscribers are more engaged than others.

This will allow you to send them more emails that match their interests and help build stronger relationships with customers.