Identifying Your First Segment

In the last chapter you went through the process of building your complete target account list. Well done! 

A common mistake people make, however, is blasting the entire list with the same generic message and content. That’s a bad idea for two reasons:

1. It results in a watered-down message that is too broad to speak to any one specific persona. It simply won’t resonate. 

2. It can hurt your domain in the eyes of email servers because you’re likely to send an email that receives little engagement and a high unsubscribe rate. 

Instead, you should be breaking your target account list into smaller cohorts that you can target with a more personalized, relevant message. 

In this chapter we’ll focus on setting the foundation for your first ABM campaign by:

• Picking your first segment

• Picking the ideal page to use for your first personalized campaign

• Gathering the assets you’ll need to personalize your page with Mutiny

This is just a simple example of why it's important to segment your audiences and show them relevant experiences across all your marketing channels.

But where do you begin? Great question – and one you'll get the answer to in the next section!

Identify your first Segment

You should now have a complete target account and contact list from the previous chapter. The next step is to break that list into smaller segments. A great starting point is to think about how your company segments buyers and customers today, for example:

• By company size

• By industry 

• By persona

• By use case

• By region

• or a combination of multiple

You’ll want to make sure your list is no smaller than 200-300 contacts. 

Going smaller may give you too many segments to manage. And more segments isn’t always better. The impact and reach might not justify the effort of creating dedicated content for each variation. You’ll also have less bandwidth to learn and iterate on each one.      

On the other hand, you don’t want your segments to be too large, otherwise you risk sounding too generic. 

Like goldilocks, you’re looking for a size that’s juuust right. 

When choosing your first segment, consider groups that you already understand well. You may already have a page targeted at this group on your website, and supporting case studies, content, and quotes.

Chose your first page

Now that you know what segment you want to target, your next step is to choose the page you want to personalize for your campaign. 

Instead of creating a brand new page from scratch, you can (and should!) use an existing page on your website. A best practice is to look for pages on your website that are already somewhat tailored to that specific segment. 

Do you already have pages created for specific personas, solutions, industries, or company sizes? These are a great place to start. 

You’ll also want to look for pages that have plenty of opportunities for personalization. This gives you lots of options for tailoring the page to your specific segment. Some key things to look for are:

• Clear H1, H2, and Call-to-action in the header

• Multiple blocks of text and images

• A logo bar

• Customer quotes 

A page containing all of these elements will allow you to tailor the experience to each contact in a way that feels truly personalized. 

Gather your personalized content

With your first segment and page selected, you now need to gather the relevant content and assets for your page. 

Talk to your sales and customer success teams who are speaking with these buyers every day. Shoot them a quick message asking a few simple questions, like:

• What content do you find resonates best with this buyer?

• What are your favorite quotes and case studies to send them?

• How do they describe their top pains?

• What value props resonate with them most?

• What logos do we have of similar customers?

Follow this up by listening to call recordings as a way to not only validate what you’re hearing from sales, but gather real messaging examples from buyers. 

Click below for a worksheet you can use to guide your sales interviews and capture all of the personalized content you need for your pages in Mutiny. 

Grab the Gathering Personalized Content Worksheet

Interviewing your sales and CS team is important because they can help you understand what content, case studies, pain points, value props, etc. are most important to this target audience. 

As you start to gather messaging, content, and data surrounding your target cohort, keep it all in a central place you can easily access later for your campaign. 

You’ll be able to easily repurpose each of these things on your page to personalize the experience to each specific contact in your campaign. 

Looking for more resources to help you build the perfect target account list? Here are some additional posts for more inspiration:

You now have your first segment and page selected, plus a folder full of relevant content! 👏

In chapter 3 you’ll be hopping into the Mutiny app to build out your first personalized experience. This is where the real magic happens.