Being Relevant Means Being Personal
Everyone who is in the services business already understands the power of personalization.
When I’m on a call with a client I take into account what I already know about them. I consider where they work, where they live, how large their company is and all this affects how I tailor my offer to them. It even affects what kind of small talk we have together!
As a business that services freelancers I realized that there are many different kinds of freelancers.
Some are solo, others have agencies, some are just starting out, others are a bit more established. They might be designers, writers, or developers of all stripes. And these differences completely change what their needs are! It doesn’t make sense to offer them a one size fits all solution.
That’s when I hypothesized, what if I could better know who my leads were when they came to my website. If I could tell if someone was a designer with 5 years experience versus a copywriter with 10 years in the industry then I could describe my own services to them with much more specificity.
Psychologically, it seemed like a good bet. That was my starting point and it lead me to turn my website into a petri dish for market segmentation and my results have been truly interesting.
With my own site, I was able to raise my unique opt-in percent from 2% to 5% relatively quickly and permanently. Overall, this equates to a 250% lift in total opt-ins from anonymous traffic that comes in from a Google search and then becomes a subscriber. That was a huge boost for my business.
I want to give you the general concept of how I take my inbound traffic and segment them into groups I can market to differently using personalization.
Finding Your Segments
First, you want to name your traffic segments. The most basic way I would break out my traffic was known traffic and anonymous traffic. The difference here is that known traffic has already opted into your email list. Anyone who is on your list would be tagged as such in my marketing automation software. This way, when they returned to my site, I’d know it wasn’t their first time visiting.
As I created more content and put it on my site I’d email it out to my list. If anyone tagged in my list of email subscribers clicked through, they would be sent to a version of the content that didn’t have the initial email opt-in grab anymore. These folks were already on my list.
Instead, I’d set the opt-in pop-up to advertise for a product they might be interested in.
This worked extremely well and was simple to do. That’s the most basic way you can segment, but it’s really just the beginning.
From there you can break your known traffic down into “customers” and “subscribers” to segment out those who have bought something and those who are just receiving your emails.
With this level of segmentation, it may make sense to offer a higher level product to those who’ve already purchased from me but just offer my entry level package to the subscribers who haven’t.
From here you can break your list down further by sending out a survey that asks your list directly to supply the relevant information you’re looking for. As long as you’ve built a relationship based on providing value with your list, your survey will probably get a strong response rate.
After the survey, you can begin tailoring other aspects of how you communicate to the individual segments down to webcopy, headlines, and products.
Action Steps
- Segment your audience into known and anonymous traffic depending whether or not they are already on your list.
- For known traffic, offer them a product instead of your general email opt-in.
- Further break down your known traffic into subscribers and customers.
- Send out a survey to your list that will help you segment them out by business metrics like industry, company size, as well as what they’d like to see from you.
- Begin tailoring your offers to each segment.
Result You Will Achieve
A more efficient sales funnel and higher conversions based on increased personalization and segmentation.
This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.