With all the benefits a customer relationship management (CRM) system can provide for PR specialists, contact segmentation is among the most significant. Why?
This feature allows you to organize and control PR campaigns to the full extent. Segmenting contacts in CRM will enable you to leverage all the data to grow your customer relations by adding value to each client (whether a company or an independent journalist).
How do you segment PR contacts in CRM so that it brings maximum results? This post will guide you through the nature and principles of contact segmentation inside and out.
What is contact segmentation in your CRM?
In plain English, segments are subgroups of contacts from your PR database, divided by their interactions with your brand.
Contact segmentation breaks your customers into smaller lists so that you optimize the efficiency of your PR endeavors through proper communication with each customer group.
Each contact segment in your CRM contains customers with similar characteristics or behaviors. You might have a list of people who’ve visited your website’s homepage. Or, there can be a list of journalists who’ve approved your pitch, subscribed to your email newsletters, looked for specific info from you, etc.
Segmenting contacts in CRM, you’ll send more informative content and personalized PR messages to these different types of users for more effective customer communication and relations.
What contact segments to include in your CRM:
- Contacts who’ve visited your homepage
- Product page visitors
- Email subscribers
- Existing customers (single order)
- Repeat visitors
- Repeat customers
- Content downloaders
- Cold/hot leads
- Conversion completed/uncompleted
- Demographics (age, gender, location, known interest, etc.)
This list isn’t complete. Every business can segment customers by their own criteria, according to their business goals and marketing strategies.
Why segment contacts in CRM?
Creating contact segments in CRM makes your work more comfortable and efficient. With customer segments at hand, you’ll send more relevant and better-targeted messages to each group, engaging them and influencing your PR results.
Contact segmentation helps you save and manage time on audience research. You’ll see profiles of the target from every separate subgroup and understand their specific needs. This information will allow you to send more authentic business messages to each contact group instead of sending generic messages to everyone.
Unlike your internal business communication, contact segmentation requires extra tools to get the job done. A customer relationship management (CRM) platform is essential to use for that:
Automation features of most CRM platforms allow you to create profiles for individual customers. More than that, they help you craft and manage your segmented lists. Also, you can migrate all the data between different CRMs, updating customers’ info along with their buying processes and the extra data you gain from them.
How to segment your PR database in CRM
Once you decide which contact segments meet your business needs, it’s time to implement them into your CRM and start segmenting customer subgroups by them.
Here are the most common segments for your database to consider:
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Segmentation by tags
In CRMs with segment builders, tags hide behind the “Contact Details” condition. They represent general data about customers: For example, tags can identify customers of particular products or represent clients you migrated from your old customer relationship management platform.
You can generate tags that will be most relevant to your database. Feel free to use hashtag generator tools or brainstorm and craft unique tags for your CRM platform.
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Segmentation by custom fields
With different custom fields in CRM, you won’t have to generate too many tags for every contact subgroup.
A custom field is what tells the full story of your clients. You can add as many areas to your CRM as needed to learn customers better and segment them accordingly.
Feel free to segment contacts by their favorite pets, the food they love, the social media they use, etc. The more data you have, the more segments you can create. Consider those most critical to know for positive PR results.
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Segmentation by source channel
A source channel is how a contact came to you. Segmenting the database by how you acquired them will help you determine the marketing areas and strategies for further focus and investment.
Source channels can be organic traffic, paid ads, social media, email pitch, etc. They are easy to track if you use marketing analytics tools, and everything you’ll need to do is associate the data from those tools with contact records in your CRM.
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Segmentation by time
By “time,” we mean a moment of contact conversion, automatically recorded in a CRM platform.
Segmentation by this attribute can help you determine a specific content asset, marketing campaign, promotional SMS, or any other PR feature that engages leads and converts them into customers.
It will give you insights into customer retention trends and help to organize your budget and marketing campaigns accordingly.
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Segmentation by demographics
This one is the most common segment in CRMs. It allows you to group contacts by age, gender, and location to communicate corresponding PR messages that meet users’ needs most.
With such segments, you can target ad campaigns more precisely. Segmentation by demographics is a must for brands with a wide range of products for a multicultural audience.
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Segmentation by product
If your business sells multiple products or offers several services, segmenting your contacts by which one they use can help to send contextually relevant messages to them.
Document a product of choice in every customer’s profile. This information will enable you to build proper brand communication with customer groups based on their preferences and interests.
In a word
Contact segmentation in your CRM can help increase your leads’ quality and make stellar marketing decisions for turning those leads into loyal customers. The more details you know about a customer journey in your company and how users change through it, the more successful you’ll guide them toward the desired action.
By segmenting your PR contacts, you’ll know customer subgroups on different sales funnel levels and develop the best solution for each subgroup on its way to conversion and beyond.
