Data is the driving factor of every great marketing campaign, but if your data is weak and improperly used, then your marketing endeavours will suffer accordingly. Enriching your data with quality information and segmenting it into appropriate groups is vital to driving campaign engagement.

Data segmentation is the division of data into related groups, allowing for specificity in their selection. Examples of data you could segment by include job title, country, age, or gender. By splitting your data, you can be more precise in your campaigns, tailoring it for the group at hand and thus saving time and costs marketing to those who are less likely to be interested in your offerings.

Meanwhile, those you do target will be much more interested and likely to engage than if you had used a generic one-size-fits-all approach.

Informa and their expansion into the MENA region

An example of segmenting done right can be seen in Informa’s recent success expanding into the Middle East and North Africa, using segmented data for highly targeted marketing campaigns.

Informa used LinkedIn and their wealth of unique member data, allowing for in-depth targeting of high-quality leads for their programme of specialist training courses and events.

Using this LinkedIn data, they were able to ensure only those in the relevant regions were targeted, plus they were able to segment contacts by industry sector and job titles, focusing specifically on project management, human resources, and finance.

For this marketing campaign, Informa had a LinkedIn InMail click-through rate of 12%, more than double the InMail average of 5%, and with leads converting into sales at a rate of 11% or more.

This is owed to their efforts to segment their data and ensure that only the most relevant and likely to be interested in their offerings were targeted. The outcomes for Informa were an increase in sales of training courses in the Middle East and North Africa and multiple successful events, such as the landmark technology event ‘LEAP’ in Riyadh.

A data segmentation checklist for your next campaign:

• First, you need to ensure the data you will be using is fresh and up to date. This involves validating the emails of contacts you already have, plus replenishing the data with new contacts. When buying contacts, it is always better to pay for fresh research, rather than use bulk providers, as you save time and money having to sort and dispose of bad data.

• Next, you need to decide on a geographical region to target. This will depend on the nature and scope of your campaign, for example, you may only want contacts located within 50 miles of London. Or, like Informa, you may want to target a whole new region to increase your international presence. You need to know the location of those you are marketing to, so you can target those with the best odds of converting.

• You can then break down your targeted region further. For example, you may want to target specific job titles, seniority, or organisation sectors. The most important part is that your segments are well-considered and serve to bolster your marketing endeavours.

• Lastly, you should think about how the message you deliver will differ between segments. Separate groups will have different motives for wanting to engage in your campaign and it’s crucial to tap into that. Providing a tailored proposition will always be more inviting to prospective leads, making them feel valued and wanted as opposed to vague offerings that could have landed in anyone’s inbox.

Segmenting for more focused campaigns

Like Informa, ensuring high specificity in your campaigns increases the chance your offering will be relevant to the recipient, growing engagement rates and the return on investment of your campaigns. In addition, by targeting smaller segments the content can be more specific, further snowballing relevance and likelihood of engagement.

While there is a limit to how far you can segment your data, one should always be pushing for more specificity, as this not only gets your campaigns into the right hands but allows for the fine-tuning of your content too, further appealing to the target audience in question.

In an age where inboxes are plagued with irrelevant spam, you have to go the extra mile to get your campaigns noticed, and there are few better ways than writing it just for a specific group. You get more value out of your marketing budget and your audience gets their interest piqued by something relevant to them.