Hey there. It's Caro from HubSpot Academy. Your marketing team is responsible for severally management activities. Not only are they responsible for generating new leads, but they're also expected to deliver qualified leads to your sales team. However, according to Gleanster Research, 50 percent of your leads will be qualified but not yet ready to buy. That's a large number of leads that aren't ready to enter your sales process. In that case, those leads need to remain with your marketing team in the lead nurturing stage. But how do you identify which lead may need further nurturing? How do you know the best ways to nurture them? That's where segmentation can help. Segmentation is the process of dividing your contacts into subgroups, known as segments, based on some type of shared characteristics. Sending every email to your entire database is one of the biggest marketing mistakes. Even if each of your leads have opted in to receive communication from you, you have to think, is this content relevant to every lead? Probably not. Rather than guessing and hoping for the best outcome from each email, segmentation will help you identify and organize your leads based on their goals, needs, and where they are in their buyer's journey. This way, you're only sending the most helpful and relevant content in each email. When it comes to developing lead nurturing campaigns, segmentation is a must. Lead nurturing is the third major stage in the lead management process. Lead nurturing involves sending the right content to the right person at the right time. By segmenting your contacts based on similar qualities, you'll improve the effectiveness of your e-mail marketing efforts and drive results. Let's hear Monique Ruiz from Claritas, a data-driven marketing company on their segmentation initiatives and email marketing results. Last year, we have a shift in our marketing department and we decided to take the time to really segment our lists. Our business is structured in a way that our sales teams are fairly aligned to different industries or verticals and our marketing department is the same way. We segmented our lists based on a few different things. Industry was the top priority, but targets solution was a secondary component. Since doing that, we've grown our list by about 200 percent and that's in just one year's time. That's impressive in itself, but we're not just growing our lists in our reach, we're seeing engaged audiences, which is even more important. Our email campaigns to financial services are seeing open rates that hit about 35 percent when the average open rate for emails is only about 25 percent, I want to say, on the high-end. Then when you look at the click-through rates, we're hitting at about 13 percent or more. The average for the industry as a whole is only about 2.5 percent. Developing a segmentation strategy is unique to each business. However, the most important segment most businesses need for lead management are life-cycle segments. Lifecycle segments are groups of contacts organized based on your company's lifecycle stages. These stages designate where your contexts are in their buyer's journey within your organization. In HubSpot, you'll find a default lifecycle stage property that helps label eight different lifecycle stages for each lead. These stages include, subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, opportunity, customer, evangelist, and other. For example, if you're sending an e-mail announcement about a software update to your product, you can specify to only send that e-mail to your customer segment. You can also block certain lifecycle segments from receiving certain communications. As another example, if you were to send an email blast offering a free product demo, you could specify to block your customer or evangelists segments. Because they're already using your product, they wouldn't benefit from a free demo. As your company begins to generate more leads, it's important your segmentation strategy evolves. Creating more segments will help you better engage with each of your unique leads. You can begin by building buyer persona segments. These can help you speak to each lead based on their unique goals and needs. If your company offers several products or services, segmenting leads by product interests can also help you provide content and information that will help you drive their purchasing decision. To make sure your contact database is clean and up to date, creating a segment for unengaged or unsubscribed leads will ensure you're not engaging with or wasting resources on irrelevant contacts. Again, segmenting leads looks different for each organization. But a great place to start is with building your lifecycle segments. Now, you may be wondering, how do I build segments in HubSpot? There's two ways. First, you can create a list. In HubSpot, there are two types of lists you can build, a static list and an active list. A static list pulls records that meet a set criteria when the list is saved. Records can also be manually added and removed from these lists. Users often create static lists if they're sending one-off email blast such as a holiday e-mail or limited time offer. Another use for a static list is when you want to delete records from your HubSpot account in bulk. Active lists automatically update their members based on filters and criteria you set. Records will automatically be added to the list when they meet the criteria and be removed once they don't. Active lists are best used if members of that list often change. For example, you should create an active list for your lifecycle segments since leader often changing lifecycle stages. If you send an email newsletter regularly, you should create an active list for your subscribers since members of that group will change over time. The second way you can segment your leads in HubSpot is by creating a saved view. Saved views is a feature in your CRM that will filter your records based on the property value you set to view for analysis. For example, you can create a view in your contacts index page to view a specific set of contacts based on certain criteria. This criteria can include things like life-cycle stage, industry, or contact owner. This feature is often used for quick analysis of certain segments in your database. When would you use a list over saved view? With lists, you can create segments by contact and company objects. With saved views, you can create segments by contact and company objects, as well as deals and ticket objects. Lists also allow you to segment leads by property values and behavior type filters, whereas a saved view is limited to segmenting leads by property values only. Also, a list can be used with other HubSpot tools while saved views can't. Overall, lists are often used for sending targeted emails and HubSpot, while saved views are often used for a quick analysis of segments. As mentioned, segmentation is key to helping your marketing team organize and engage with each of your unique leads. Not only is it a must for your lead nurturing efforts, but it's proving the drive results for your email marketing initiatives. With the help of HubSpot, segmenting your leads will ensure you're sending the right content to the right person at the right time, and ultimately help you build authentic relationships with each of your leads.
