How to Capture the Necessary Data for Segmentation

[Shakhawat]

In order to map companies and contacts back to the appropriate ICP and buyer persona, you need to collect data about those necessary characteristics. There are two primary ways to capture that information: forms and enrichment.

Forms
When someone is signing up for communications with your company or downloading a gated offer, you can ask them for the information you need using forms.

However, you shouldn’t ask them for every data point you employment database could possibly use for segmentation the first time they convert on your site. To collect all the information you need without causing too much friction for site visitors, it’s best to use progressive forms, which will change which questions appear on each form a visitor fills out based on the information you still need to know about that contact.

Enrichment
Instead of asking contacts to give you information, you can also use a data enrichment tool that appends new and existing contact records with the data you require for segmentation.

For example, if someone gives you their company email address on a form, a data enrichment tool can associate that with a company domain and then automatically fill in company information in your CRM.

Enrichment tools can’t give you qualitative information like pain points and challenges, but by filling in all the quantitative data points, you can eliminate those form fields. This allows you to focus on more qualitative questions, which reduces friction when converting leads and improves the user experience for site visitors.

Once you have all that data, you can create reports around these segments to understand the health of your customer base. If you’re just getting started, looking at total revenue and customer lifetime value by segment will give you a lot of insights, but you can dig as deep as you want.

You can look at product usage by segment to understand who’s the most engaged with your product or service. You can look into support requests to see which segments have the most issues. You can use segmentation to identify which types of customers have the most issues related to billing and collections.

All of those factors help you understand what makes the most successful customer for your company, and then you can use that knowledge to focus your customer acquisition on those high-performing segments.