The most crucial aspect of your direct mail campaign is your prospect or member. Even the most visually appealing mailer will end up in the garbage if your receiver isn’t a good fit for your offer. The best way you to avoid having your mailers ignored is by planning correctly for your targeted audience. Once you understand your audience, you need to score your leads and segment the individuals on your mailing list before creating and mailing your campaign.
Planning Your Audience
You must know how to categorize your audience. There are a few ways you can gather data to start segmenting and scoring your leads.
Access Your Data
You can use your website data to track visitors’ behavior. A user who lingers on your “About” or “Services” page is most likely a new lead. But another person who is looking at your pricing and contact pages may be closer to joining your organization. You can also review order history, buyer frequency, and buyer recency to categorize your prospects and members further.
Your social media is another great spot you can analyze. See who is liking and commenting on your posts. Are they local or out of the area? You can analyze what genders they are and what generation they may fall in. All this information provides you with actionable insights into your inbound audiences. Once you understand your audience based on reviewing your data, you can start lead scoring.
What Is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is a shared marketing method for ranking leads to determine sales-readiness. You score the leads based on the level of interest they show in your organization, their current point in the purchasing cycle, and their fit regarding your mission.
Lead scoring can help your organization know whether prospects should be fast-tracked to sales or developed with lead nurturing.
How to Lead Score
Your organization can score leads by assigning points. You can implement rankings like A, B, C, or use terms like cold, warm, or hot. The main point is that marketing and sales increase their combined efficiency and productivity based on the clarity of a sales-ready lead.
The best lead scoring systems use demographic and firmographic attributes, including company size, industry, and job title, as well as behavioral scoring like clicks, keywords, and web visits. You can see if specific zip codes or member types respond better to some mailings over others. You should also consider assigning a task force who can review metrics from previous campaigns and discover new data about what your leads care about and which offers or messaging resonated with most of them.
Audience Segmentation
After analyzing your audience, you can move into a lead score or audience segmentation. Segmenting your audience is the process of dividing a large audience into smaller segments who have similar needs or characteristics. The data you analyzed will reveal demographic components, such as what gender or age-range is interacting with you the most.
For your marketing campaign, you can segment your audience to include primarily females in their 30’s and 40’s, if that’s what your data reveals as your most interested person at the time. After segmenting your audience, you can build your campaign around the target demographics.
You can use firmographics for audience segmentation too. Firmographic data is more focused around a geographic area, the number of clients, the type of organization or industry. It’s the corporate equivalent of demographics, and you can market in this manner if your goal is to network with a larger organization and its staff.
Marketing to Fit Different Audiences
The great thing about segmentation is that you can refine your direct mail to speak directly to that group. For instance, if you’re targeting older female executives, you can personalize several aspects of your campaign, including the image, the written content, and the format or type of mailing. You can customize the entire content of your mailing. A senior executive will appreciate concise, on-target content, and it will help them decide on your organization.
Lead Scoring and Segmentation with Valtim
Valtim understands your need to know who your prospects are, why they may relate to your organization, and what is driving them to engage with you. Your organization will see a better return on your investment by understanding your audience and then creating a lead scoring or audience segmentation model before sending a marketing campaign. Contact Valtim to start lead scoring and segmenting your audience.