Getting Started With Lead Segmentation: Four Key Benefits

Each of your leads and customers is unique, with different behaviors and different demographics that you need to pay attention to. You need to utilize customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to keep your relationships with leads strong throughout the marketing process. But how do you capitalize on each lead’s specific qualities and design your marketing content around them?

That’s where lead segmentation and lead management comes in. Lead management is the process by which a marketing team generates and handles leads during the marketing process, from the initial contact or user awareness to making the final sale. Segmentation is a feature of marketing automation software where they sort your leads into lists defined by a specific category or demographic. This might seem like a simple concept, but they’re incredibly important in creating focused and successful marketing campaigns.

But what are the benefits of lead management and segmentation, and why are they crucial in an effective marketing campaign? There are several reasons to manage leads and utilize segmentation, and you can achieve most of these benefits with the help of your marketing automation tool. Below are just some of the ways lead management and segmentation help marketers organize their leads efficiently and create campaigns that work.

Easier processing of lead scoring

Marketing automation programs can help you assign scores to leads based on their attributes, and segmentation allows you to group leads based on their score. You can place leads that score very high onto a list that’s separate from less qualified leads, thereby keeping all your leads organized into understandable categories. If you sort your leads this way, you’ll always be able to keep track of which leads are the most valuable.

Determining qualified leads

Not every lead you receive is going to end up a buyer. It’s the responsibility of your marketing team to weed out the leads that aren’t worth the trouble to pursue. If you have a proper lead management process, it’ll be easier for your company to see if a lead is sales-worthy. Your team should have a good understanding of the qualities and behaviors you want to see in your lead; you can manage your leads by having a marketing automation solution look for these characteristics in every lead you generate.

Once you’ve defined the demographics and behaviors of each lead, you can segment them into categories based on how likely you are to convert them. One way to do this is by looking at their characteristics to determine where they are in the buyer’s journey. Leads are more likely to be transferred to the sales team if they’ve expressed interest in buying your product than if they’re only visiting your site for the first time. Having segments for each journey stage lets you know which leads your sales team can move forward with and which ones you need to keep monitoring.

Personalization and lead nurturing

One of the most useful techniques marketers can do when working with leads is lead nurturing, and one of the ways they do this is by personalizing content to best suit the person. If you segment leads according to demographics such as job title or location, you can personalize the content you send to them based on these demographics. Personalization of content based on segmentation is one of the best methods of improving CRM because it indicates an awareness of the prospect and will help to avoid looking like automated content.

Say you have content that works best for CEOs and presidents of companies. By segmenting your leads and having a list for CEOs and presidents, you know exactly who to send this content variant to. This could apply to any demographic, but your marketing team should come together and decide how you want to segment in regards to personalized content. You might also want to segment leads by the source they visited your site from. If a lead was directed to you from a specific website, you might consider personalizing your content based around where they came from.

Location-based marketing strategies

Depending on the product or service you provide, your visitors and leads may come from a wide spread of locations around the globe. If you receive a lot of international traffic, segmenting leads based on their location is a useful way to manage leads across various cultures and time zones. You can group leads by their location to help determine an optimal time to send content or personalize that content according to the country your lead lives in. 

These benefits are just some of the ways properly managing your leads and using segmentation in your marketing automation platform helps you market your product. Managing and segmenting leads helps you understand the qualities of each lead and use those qualities to plan out a marketing solution for them. And having a solid marketing solution for each of your leads will lead to better customer relationships, which are invaluable when it comes to turning your leads into sales.