If-else Loop Nightmares of Marketers and How Behavioral Segments are the Saviors

If you’re an email marketer, you already know the problem of email marketing in SaaS. Most of it stems from your list. Here are some common problems with the lists

• Too many lists or unorganized lists
• Too many or too few emails in a single list
• Lists lack contexts or meaning

This being the problem of the lists, here’s the result; email campaigns are not usually that effective. What’s a solution to this problem? People often jump into segmenting their audience. Typically, email marketing segmentation is based on attributes and rules. So, begins the elaborate exercises to craft explicit behavioral segments. Marketers who are not coders then set to craft ‘if then else’ loops that usually are nightmare stories. Why does this not work? A few simple reasons

1. You don’t have all the attributes on a subscriber, and populating data is an engineering effort that needs inputs from different channels, often meaning integrations
2. The loops marketers end up crafting is usually complex and not an actual reflection of the customer journey, i.e. You don’t really know if the customer visits the website or does a certain activity and yet could be still using your product
3. These segments have entry criteria, which means when your audience qualifies for criteria, they end up in the list. But, as there are no exit criteria, they never get removed, leading to the creation of large lists.

These challenges are often very simple to solve, yet they accumulate and reduce the overall effectiveness of an email campaign that even the best b2b email marketing software can’t save. This continues to plague the entire industry, and there’s no real solution for it from the platforms themselves. Any solutions here require manual work and a lot of effort from marketers and sometimes engineering. We think there’s an alternate way to do these segmentations and have them more focused. At Glance, we set out to solve this in the following way.

• Align lists according to their goals. Each segment is focused on a certain goal, e.g. “webinar attendees” segment is focused on the “convert-to-a-free-trial” goal. We believe by associating a goal to a list, it’s clear what the marketer should aim for in his campaigns. It also defines the content type he can target them and measure its effectiveness
• Segment existing lists or tags according to how you’ve organized your audience by known behavior models. Here in Glance, we actively segment lists on behaviors that are quantifiable 
• Actively segment users on behaviors that are accountable, i.e. email open rates, open times, click rates, historical email opens, product usage, CRM notes, and in some cases, web visits, and customer service tickets.
• Create segments with different levels of intent, i.e. interested, engaged, and ready to act. These are just labels, we could ask you to name it whatever. All we need to understand is where the audience is in their journey and send them the right messaging based on their intent level
• Track the completion of goals of these audiences and organize them to move on to the next one, which could be a simple goal like retention

Having this structural approach not only segments the audiences actively but keeps them moving along the goal you want to achieve. The growth marketer can then use intelligent segments within their email workflows and decision trees for campaigns. Doing this in a disciplined fashion helps you find possible weaknesses in your content strategy and actively grades your audience and acquisition channel effectiveness.

At Glance, we help email marketers organize their goals and align their lists or tags to these goals. We actively segment users and take the trouble of moving them across the segments based on their level of intent. We actively measure these by connecting the dots from other signals, e.g. CRM, product analytics, and email campaign history. We actively track the progress of the audience across goals and segments and present outcomes with the help of our intelligent email automation software.

In doing this, we’ve noticed that we have made contact lists effective by 50%, increased email campaign performance, in terms of open rates and CTOR, by 60% to 200%, and have achieved conversion for product buy.

Feel free to sign up, if you’d like to leverage Glance on your Hubspot or Mailchimp for your business