The 3 Steps to CRM Success: Segment, Contextualise, Personalise

Adaptability and innovation have proven to be powerful tools for marketing success. Similarly, having the backing and the advantages of a CRM system, can catapult your business or brand’s marketing efforts to better conversions and engagement, while ensuring that you foster more intimate and impactful connections with your audience along the way. Leveraging the expertise of a CRM, such as HubSpot, can be the catalyst for your success. It’s like having a trusted partner by your side at all times to guide you through everything, with metrics on all that matters, as well as being a sophisticated ally that can turn your data into actionable insights. 

HubSpot CRM can help your craft compelling, impactful and meaningful campaigns, while guiding you through the 3 defining steps to CRM success on every part of your marketing strategy: 

• Segment: ensure prospects hear a message suited to their needs
• Contextualise: explain in clear terms why it’s useful
• Personalise: make them feel valued and loved 

Segmentation: 

Segmentation refers to the categorisation of your audience into specific, distinct groups that share common characteristics, behaviours, purchase history, demographics, etc. Why is this important? Imagine sending the same exact message to all your customers, completely disregarding their needs and preferences, which can lead to increased disengagement and a missed opportunity for actually targeting customers more individually and specifically. 

When you consider that, on average, you are bombarded with over 5000 ads and promotional material on a daily basis, a big percentage of those are bound to be completely irrelevant and uninteresting to your preferences and needs. 

This is where your CRM’s segmentation can come in to dissect your customer base in an effective and productive way by identifying common traits, in order to make your audience feel heard and understood. Only then can you go on to provide them with content that they will appreciate, when they need it and in a way that will make their life easier. 

• Use HubSpot lists to segment your database: Lists are a great way to isolate segments of your database by any data point you hold. It can be contacted by (who they are) company (where they work) or activity (what they’re doing) focussed and they can even constantly update to suit changing data fields in real-time.
  
  
• Create manually tracked customer behavioural events: Manually tracked custom behavioural events enable you to define and track events that are unique to your business. Custom behavioural events can be tied to contact properties, which you can then use across HubSpot's tools. Manually tracked events use the analytics API, and require a developer to set up.

Contextualisation:

Contextualisation refers to figuring out what part of the buyer’s journey your customers are on and delivering them with content that aligns with their needs, interests and preferences. After all, every prospect goes through some key stages before acting upon making a purchase: Awareness, Consideration and Decision, and the contextualisation step of your CRM can successfully guide your customers from learning about your business or brand to actually closing a deal with you. 

Although there may be varying degrees of time lapsing between the buying stages, depending on what service or product you are offering, the fact that consumers need certain contents at each stage in order to be able to make their decision is non-negotiable. Once your content is aligned with their unique needs at each stage, you’ll be able to maximise engagement and conversions, as well nurture leads and drive sales by sending out the right message at the right time, which is precisely where HubSpot CRM can act as your guiding light. 

• Build campaign triggers that are linked to the buyer’s journey using HubSpot: By labelling prospects in your CRM depending on their customer journey, you can ensure they see suitable messaging for their journey. Like you’re probably unlikely to propose marriage on a first date, you also don’t want to bombard a prospect with technical data when they’ve only just discovered they have a problem. Keep sending well timed, useful pieces of information like a small trail of breadcrumbs that draw the buyer in rather than forcing your product on them too soon.
  
  
• Use HubSpot smart content to contextualise your message to scale: HubSpot Smart content allows you to create different content based on a set of rules. Your emails, landing pages and CTAs can display differently depending on what is known about a prospect or contact. 

Personalisation:

Personalisation refers to the art of making every customer feel heard, valued and understood by providing them with fully tailored content that appears as if it was made just for them. That is exactly the feeling you should aim for each of your customers, because that will make them become part of your loyal community. They’ll then be more inclined to engage and interact with you and thus guide better conversions and sales for your business. 

There’s great power in addressing your customers by name and tailoring your content to their precise preferences at any stage during their buyer’s journey and process. Modern marketing very much relies on the concept of personalisation to drive engagement and boost your ROI potential, but it is more than just a trend; it’s become a necessity, and for good reason. 

When thinking of adapting modern and effective personalisation, you need to consider the timing of your messaging, the tone of voice that will appeal to your customers and having a subject matter that completely aligns with their values and interests. HubSpot is a great CRM source for adapting and upscaling your personalisation tactics, but it’s always important to consider all 3 steps of CRM success, in order for the marketing stars to align. 

It may actually be simpler if you consider them in the following way: 

Segmentation - to whom do we want to speak?
Contextualisation - what are we going to say?
Personalisation - how are we going to say it?

CRM-powered marketing has come a long way to establish itself as a catalyst in marketing success. HubSpot CRM can provide you with tools and principles that are extremely resourceful in guiding you towards crafting compelling and customer-centric campaigns, as well as dynamically data-driven strategies. The 3 defining steps to CRM success, segmentation, contextualization and personalisation, can act as your compass in navigating modern marketing fundamentals and allow you to become more time-efficient and productive in your business’ growth.