As Client Success Director at JitterJam, I get the straight-up job of coming up with innovative, effective, creative and efficient ways to use our great feature set in the manner best fitting each unique business and situation. I want all JitterJam clients to be wildly successful; I hope the tips shared in this blog category will set you on that path.
Segmenting Your JitterJam Contacts (Part I)
This is part I in a series on segmentation and will cover benefits and how to get started. Part II will dive deeper into additional ways to segment and strategies to consider.
Why Segment?
If you’re a JitterJam client today, be sure to take full advantage of all the ways to segment your Twitter, Facebook, mobile, email and/or blogger contacts in your JitterJam intelligent contact database. Knowing who you are talking to can have a profound affect on your communication! Think about the categories of people who might be interested in your product or service. Is your ideal prospect an outdoorsy adventurer or a cuddle-up-with-a-good-book type? Who typically purchases your product/service—a caretaker of a senior, a medical doctor or a professor, a teacher or a technician, a HS or college age student, a parent of infants, toddlers or school age kids? Is this typically given as a gift or bought for personal consumption/use? Would a city-dweller or a suburbanite be a better fit—or doesn’t that matter? Is your product/service more popular with males or females?
These are all potential segmentation attributes that you can discover and store with each contact and utilize when creating focused messages to targeted populations to your database! Think about how different—and more effective—a communication that’s focused on the needs of a parent of school-age kids would be versus a generic message about the features of your product. Segmenting your contact database will help you define and reach the right people with the right message!
If your product/service can be used by a very diverse population, you may be thinking that you are out of the woods on segmentation. Not so fast! Think about all the types of people mentioned above; would you speak the exact same way to every one of those people if they walked into your showroom? I didn’t think so. Applying segmentation allows you to customize your tone and language; lets you adjust the amount of slang, sarcasm or humor; it even enables you to present a customized special or promotion to match each segment you want to engage with!
Here’s an example of interests for people involved in home improvement projects. How can you utilize what you know (and learn) about your contacts to better segment your database?
How to Discover and Add Segmentation to Your JitterJam Contacts
Start with your contacts’ interests and where these intersect with your product or service. There are a variety of ways to learn about these interests.
- Use keywords.
- Use a new Social Search to find conversations and tag contacts. Create a new JitterJam Social Search to discover conversations containing key words or phrases that are frequently used by people talking about a specific topic of interest. Test this search (and tweak it if necessary) to eliminate non-relevant conversations and pick up a high percentage of good conversations. When you are creating the search, specify a tag for the search. This will act as an interest “flag”; when you review the social search results, if you add this person to your JitterJam database, JitterJam will automatically apply the appropriate tag to the contact!
- Analyze existing results for common keywords. Open your brand-specific social search and run the “Analyze Keywords” function to see if the conversations reveal the interests of the authors. If they do, select all of the contacts with a specific interest and apply a tag to all the contacts at once (TIP: use the Gear icon at the upper left corner!) Continue to work through any other interests which stood out while analyzing the conversations and tag each group of contacts with these interests.
- Search through social profiles, bios and descriptions.
- Most people on social networks provide key information in their public profiles. You can search through the profile descriptions of your JitterJam contacts and utilize the keywords and descriptions within those profiles to segment your contacts. Go to Develop/All in JitterJam. Open the “Advanced Filters” window (click on white bar below the sub-tabs). Find the Smart Search section and enter one or more key words. Click on the “Update” button and all contacts who match your entered criteria are returned. From here, you can tag one, more or all of the contacts. And just think—this is based on data your contacts have entered and made public about themselves!
- Ask!
- Our Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system enables you to ask your contacts how they would like to be contacted (Twitter, Facebook notification, email and/or SMS text message) and how frequently (once a week, once a month, etc.). Additionally, you can ask your contacts to specify their interests and even some demographic information. When you let your contacts know that you will use this data to create relevant offers in a way that adheres to their personal preferences, you will have made your contacts happy!
Listen to conversations your prospects are having. Pick up clues using keyword mentions of activities or interests they’re involved in. This can be done in a couple of ways:
Need an Extra Nudge?
Consider this: As a consumer, aren’t you so much more willing to receive a marketing message offering a discount on something you’re definitely interested in than on, say, a product you would notice only if you physically tripped over it?! I know I am! For instance, if you were listening on the social web and heard me mention that I have two sons who have both outgrown their ski equipment (uugghhh!) and were to toss me a 20% off promo code to use at your ski shop, I’d love you—truly! Remember, just as easily as your prospects opted in to receive marketing communications from you, they can opt out. Don’t give them a reason to; instead, give them every opportunity and reason to stay!
What Do You Think?
Do you have any particular segmentation by which you would like to craft communications or offerings? How do you accomplish this today? Is this data stored in systems or lists within your company? Are you using this valuable data to reach your contacts?
Yes I do have a particular segmentation by which I would like to craft communications. At the moment we our data stored in word and excel lists in our organization that has offices in a different countries. I am looking into coming up with a better way of organizing the contact lists we have.