Online Marketing Summit - The Ability to Segment is Critical

I've been attending the Online Marketing Summit for the last few days in San Diego -- kudos to Aaron Kahlow and the team at BusinessOnline who put this event together.  It is an excellent educational opportunity for everyone engaged in effective online marketing initiatives.

I will be posting some of the insights gleaned from those two and a half days, as the dust settles from all the input and interactions.

One of the top items, as I attended different sessions -- from Content, Search Engine Optimization, Lead Nurturing, and the effective use of Microsites, is the need and requirement for effective Segmentation.

Obviously, this requires a true knowledge of your audience and speaks to persona development as well -- which ClickZ has a good article, entitled "Persona Development and the Law of Averages", which in it's way highlights the need for segmentation.

Marketing folks then shriek, "I don't have time or resources for this!", because it's just plain easier to "batch and blast" - even if that approach, and studies back it up, don't produce the kind of returns you need or could be getting if you were to take on the segmenting and targeting challenge.  Consider this statistic, presented in one of the sessions: you can get 389% better results from segementing your list. (I'll put the specific info about that study once I get the powerpoint from the presentation).

Which brings me to the question of technology and tools.  Are you able to segment your leads beyond basic demographic information?  Do your tools allow you to create lists based on activity and interest data that you've been capturing for those leads in your system?  Can you create "dynamic lists" that can be used with an ongoing email strategy for folks who fit particular criteria, so you can continue to be relevant as your demand generation strategies drive traffic to your site and capture leads into your system?  Because with the right tools in place, segmenting doesn't have to be as challenging as you think.

With the right segmenting, you might actually send out FEWER emails than you do today, and get HIGHER returns and conversions.  Now that is something worth looking at!