Multi-Dimensional Segmentation Engine – Beyond the Smart Lists

Marketing Analytics is a term that has become synonymous with the success of all modern marketing organizations and database segmentation engine is the key part of marketing analytics.

The core competency that differentiates the winning organizations is their ability to objectively evaluate the investments that drive the highest engagement and pipeline growth.

Whenever the term marketing analytics is mentioned, the first thought and rightly so is in relation to the “performance measurement” aspect of marketing – the means through which marketing teams are able to demonstrate the impact they are making on the pipeline and revenue growth. However, there is another critical aspect of marketing analytics and it is related to marketing database management.

Marketing Database Management is another core aspect of modern marketing that powers the marketing campaigns to create contextual customer experiences, which influences the buying decisions.

This customer experience is the key factor that differentiates the high performing and growth-focused marketing organizations. On a day to day basis, marketing teams rely on data base management for so called “list building” efforts for their campaigns. When it comes to segmentation, most of the marketing teams pretty much rely on the lists (or smart lists) that are built inside the marketing automation platforms.

As marketing analytics capabilities are maturing across the organizations, questions are being asked to go beyond just using the marketing engagement and demographics data for segmentations.

Modern marketing teams are leveraging the data across the MarTech platforms to provide a 360-degree view of the customer/prospects and enable contextual segmentation for campaigns. This is where the

concept of “Multi-Dimensional Contextual Segmentation Engine” comes into play where capabilities are built to continuously feed data from the core business operations platforms (including finance, sales and marketing) into one central data warehouse.

Having all the relevant data in one place enables marketing analysts to cross-hatch the data from different sources across different stages of the buyer’s journey and build contextual segmentations and micro-segmentations per the needs of the campaigns both for digital and offline campaigns. Leveraging our marketing analytics services, we provide marketing teams with an intuitive visual interface (built using modern BI tools like Tableau, Looker, PowerBI, DOMO) to build multiple micro-segments on the fly that are tailored to the strategy and call-to-action of their campaigns.

This ability to go beyond marketing automation platforms to build information rich and contextual segments on the fly was beyond imagination for our customers before we implemented the contextual segmentation engines at their organizations.

We are helping all our customers think beyond the usual demographics data (like role, job level, location, etc.) when it comes to building segments for their campaigns and leveraging historic campaign engagement, pipeline history, web engagement, and most importantly, the intent data that signals buying behavior. There are a lot of hidden insights that are captured by marketing tech, CRM, and sales engagement platforms that could be used in building micro-segments. With the contextual segmentation engine, we have enabled our customers with the capabilities to build these micro-segments on-the-fly and align messaging, offers, and channels accordingly to drive higher engagement for all their programs.

When it comes to managing the marketing database and getting the most out of them, there are 3 core competencies:

• The ability of the marketing organizations to have real-time insights into the health of the database via database health metrics reports and dashboards.
• Operational frameworks and procedures to continuously track and optimize the quality integrity of the database, which is constantly changing.
• Marketing Analytics capabilities to mine the database for segmentation to enable contextual experiences for all marketing campaigns, which in turn drive higher engagement and accelerate pipeline generation.

The real value adds for the database health insights that are powered by the database segmentation engine is to enable micro-segmentation for all marketing campaigns

especially for events, virtual events, webinars, and field marketing campaigns. When it comes to segmentation and list building for the campaigns, most of the marketing organizations still rely on explicit data (mainly demographics data). This does not seem to do justice to the massive investments that the organizations make in the marketing tech stacks. This concept of micro-segmentation is fascinating to see it in-action and this case study about webinar registrations paints a beautiful picture of the extraordinary results that can be achieved with this holistic data-driven approach.

One of our customers (a SaaS start-up) had been seeing good but relatively flat engagement and pipeline influence from their webinars as demonstrated by the campaign performance reports that we had built. They were planning on further investing in webinars to accelerate pipeline generation and wanted to make sure that they can increase conversions both in terms of engagement and pipeline from their webinars. During our initial discussion and data analysis for webinar campaign data, we realized that there were a lot of insights the webinar segments were missing out on leveraging as they were primarily relying on demographics data for driving webinar registrations. Leveraging our database insights frameworks and contextual segmentation engine, we helped them put together a comprehensive webinar strategy powered by micro-segmentations. Instead of 1 segment for the webinar, we helped them put together 4 different micro-segments. One of the micro-segment was of those leads who had been actively engaging with the webinars over a given time. This particular webinar was meant for practitioners (rather than for the decision-makers) so we helped them discover a few insights about the practitioner persona to appeal to the practitioners who were seen as using their products on a day to day basis. We even took this 1 step further and helped them further categorize the practitioner segment into 3 different micro-segments based on the past 90 days of the web behavior and engagement on their platform and their pipeline history with the organization.

With these insights, their team was able to craft unique contextual messaging for each of the micro-segments resulting in a 16% improvement in webinar conversions.

This case study reinforces the fact that the marketing database is a gold-mine for any marketing organization. Given that the marketing database is the foundation of any marketing and sales playbook, database insights are relevant for all marketing campaigns and sales conversations.

We did not have to go anywhere to get these additional insights for the webinar micro-segments. They were right there in the marketing automation and CRM platforms that our customer was already using. We just had to understand the business questions, leverage the existing marketing analytics capabilities to mine the data accordingly to surface the insights, and make them easily available for the marketers. We started with the key (and extremely relevant) business questions from the sales and marketing leaders. We then reviewed what we could answer with the capabilities we had put in place based on earlier asks, had follow-up discussions to understand further what was being asked for, how it would be used, and then we went about building the solution with the set of tools we already had in the organization.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, we did not jump to get the fanciest MarTech tools and then started figuring out how to use them and if they were of any relevance for what the business needs were. Déjà vu!

We are always on the lookout for inputs and examples from the marketing community to keep adding value for our customers. We welcome the inputs and feedback from other leaders and practitioners around how you are leveraging the insights rich data across the MarTech platforms? Have you built the capabilities in your organizations to enable marketing teams to build the micro-segmentation on-the-fly for their campaigns?