How to Segment Your Leads and Customers in HubSpot

[Gilempert]

The marketer's mantra is to focus on the customer and personalize the experience. We want to make sure every lead or customer who visits or makes a purchase gets just the right message, at exactly the right time. This isn't an easy challenge--even the most digitally savvy companies are trying to make their marketing efforts more personal. HubSpot has made this a core part of its CRM with its functionality to segment customers.

It all starts with the data

If you landed here, we are pretty sure data management is a big deal for you and your company. The core idea of using segmentation is getting all the data you have collected, from forms, ads, bots, emails, website visitors, and of course your CRM, to good use by personalizing your user’s experience and using it too, to optimize your conversion rates. 

Here are some tips to consider when thinking about segmentation:

1. Define Your Buyer Persona

If you don’t know who you are marketing to, you need to go back to the start and define this before you can implement a successful strategy. What matters most to them? What problem do they have that your business solves? Answering these questions can help you determine what kind of message will be relevant to them.

2. Ask Customers About Their Pain Points

The next step is to ask customers to self-affirm their biggest problem on your contact page, chatbot, or other lead in-take form. This simple step will not only help your prospects clarify on their struggle, but will also show you understand where they're coming from and establish you as a potentially good fit. Using a Dropdown select feature, write possible reasons why your customer might want your services. The visitor should only be able to select one answer.

When writing the options, think about the ways you can help your customers and how you can't. You may want to add in an anti-persona, a service you don't offer, to filter out visitors who aren't a good fit. 

3. Identify the Persona's Priorities

Finally, use a dependent field to create branching logic. So, if a visitor chooses pain point A, they'll be asked a second question that is specific to their pain point. Let's say a marketing agency asks prospects to identify as one of three persona's as follows:

Which statement represents you the most?

• I want to automate my business as much a possible
• I'm a solopreneur and want to get new clients 
• I am growing quickly and need help to scale properly

Each option will then lead to a question that is relevant to that persona only. Segmenting leads in this way can help you offer a personalized sales process. 

These three straightforward steps will help you set up a clean, responsive, and focused form that helps your prospects communicate their problem and your sales team save time during the sales process. It will also give you higher-quality information with fewer questions.

How to easily segment your contacts in HubSpot?

1 word: Lists.

In HubSpot, you have two different types of lists: static and active lists. What’s the difference? 

Active lists automatically update their members based on their segmentation criteria. Contacts will join the list when they meet the criteria and leave the list when they no longer meet the criteria.

Static lists include contacts that meet set criteria at the point when the list is saved. Static lists do not update automatically, so new records that meet the criteria will not be added to the list. Records can be manually added and removed from static lists.

Based on these criteria we can quickly and easily start grouping contacts in different categories from broader categories to more specific ones, based on the information you have. For example, Contacts, Lifecycle Stages, Customer, and find the ones that haven’t purchased in more than six months. In this case, you planned this action because you know that if an order is not placed in a time frame of 6 months, they are probably considering working with a competitor.

Lists can be enrolled in workflows and will enable you to automate actions and processes, for example, remind your customers of a contract renewal coming up.

Use segmentation and improve your results

Before we end this article we wanted to show some numbers that illustrate the power of segmentation. These numbers are from one of our customers, we target a specific buyer persona that is interested in one of our customer’s product lines. Their industry performs at an average of 2,9% conversion rate for landing pages, here are the results with a segmentation approach, we increase the conversion rate by almost 40%.

Image Source: Unbounce.com (median rates of click-through and form-fill landing pages specifically)

Here’s another screenshot of the performance of email campaigns to the same segment

You can monitor your email sending reputation with HubSpot’s email health tool, more information here.

Let's segment!

Segmenting is critical to understanding your customer – their pain points, signs of happiness, and what makes them tick. Segmentation is key to helping companies grow their customer base and expose new opportunities in ways that might not have been possible before. At the same time, segmentation can be terrifying — it means making decisions about who gets what and when. We promise it’s worth the try, targeted messaging will help drive you towards more conversion and retention with your leads and customers.