News
B2B E-Marketing
Advice You Can Put to Work
By Justin Talerico, CEO of ion
interactive
We tend to know a lot about a few people, and a
little about a lot of people. Never is that more
true than in B2B e-marketing. Historically, we
entice less than 5% of email, advertising and search
engine respondents to move beyond a first click. On
those 5%, we’ll know their email address and
name—maybe more. On the other 95% we’ll know next to
nothing—home planet, IP address, country and browser
choice. So how do you know that you’re converting
the best respondents? You don’t. But you can.
Pre-conversion segmentation can shed light on who’s
responding versus converting. It’s far more
meaningful than what you learn from conversions,
because it’s taken on a much higher percentage of
respondents. Instead of having knowledge on only the
5% who actually convert, pre-conversion segmentation
may yield high-value data on 40-80% of all
respondents. What you learn from those 40-80% can
help you in two key areas. First, you can know who’s
not converting. Second, you can know which traffic
sources are giving you the highest quality clicks.
Early segmentation works best when it’s self-serving
for the respondent. If you make your pre-conversion
segmentation all about the user, he or she will
choose accurately and, as a result, give you the
data you need. In addition to being user-beneficial,
early segmentation should be formless, easy and
commitment-free. A very effective means of early
segmentation is to make the first page the
respondent sees a very simple choice closely related
to the message that enticed their click. By making
that choice important to the user, you earn the next
click. By making that choice strategically
significant to your marketing, you make that click
extremely valuable to your organization.
Let’s say, for example, you’re marketing a product
to hospitals and your offer to entice the click is a
free white paper. Your means of pre-conversion
segmentation could be to build on the free white
paper promise by immediately asking if the
respondent would like a white paper for smaller
hospitals or larger hospitals (or if it doesn’t
matter because they’re not affiliated with a
hospital). After respondents make that next click,
you know how many large, small and non-hospital
respondents you’re attracting. Compare that with
who’s converting and learn how effective your
post-click messaging is at engaging your ideal
prospect. Compare segmentation data across traffic
sources, and see which vehicles are doing the best
job of delivering the audience you want most.
Taking that example a step further can help you
understand how valuable that early segmentation data
can be. Let’s say your conversion data shows that
75% of conversions are from large hospitals, but
pre-conversion data shows that 70% of respondents
are actually from small hospitals. Right away, you
know that whatever you’re saying after the click is
much more engaging to larger hospitals than smaller
ones. If you’re targeting larger hospitals, that’s
great, but if you’re after the smaller ones, it’s
time to make some adjustments. Without that
pre-conversion benchmark data, you would have no way
of seeing the untapped potential in your
respondents.
Using pre-conversion segmentation, you can design
simple decision trees that describe who’s who by
simply recording their choices. This is a formless
and commitment-free process in which users engage to
gain content or offers that they feel are very
specific to their needs. As a marketer you can use
this pre-conversion data to judge how good you are
at converting the people who are the best fits for
your products or services. Typically, pre-conversion
segmentation works on 40-80% of respondents—a far
cry from the 5% that are likely to convert. With
that you know a lot more about a lot more people.
---Source: Reprinted with permission from ion
interactive www.ioninteractive.com. Justin Talerico
is the CEO of ion interactive. Reach him at
jtalerico@ioninteractive.com.
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