Advanced Segmentation Audits: Ensuring Precision and Performance in Marketo Engage
Join Adobe Marketo Engage Champion Darshil Shah to learn how to keep your Segmentation aligned with customer behaviors, data updates, and business changes.
In this webinar you will learn about,
- Understanding and reviewing Segmentation to stay aligned with customer behaviors and avoid common pitfalls like over-Segmentation, stale segments, and misaligned rules.
- Editing and updating Segmentations with best practices to maintain an efficient, compliant, and high-performing Segmentation strategy.
- Monitoring and enhancing performance through campaign reports to ensure your marketing efforts are always on target.
Okay. Without further ado, I love to pass it over to our awesome champion Dajjal Shah to cover advanced segmentation audits, ensuring precision and performance in Marketo. Engage. Awesome, awesome. Thanks, Stephanie. Hey everyone, this is special. I see a lot of familiar names in the chat. Thank you everyone for joining. We’ll start with a quick introduction and I have awesome content lined up for, everyone. So, I work as a senior consultant at Deloitte, and doing a, executive MBA as well. On the weekends. So I’m mostly busy. You know, during the weekdays, for the full time job. And over the weekend, I, attend classes. Talking about my Adobe journey, I am a Adobe experience maker Awards winner 2024. And I’ve been finalist, last year in 2023.
Including this time I am three time marketing champion. And, I’m also marketing data architect and expert. And I also work with the certification team to, in order to for to to structure the, examination that makes me the subject matter expert and, been, active participant in the community and also champion of the year 2022 and 2023. There are two QR codes that you would be seeing right now. One is to connect with me on LinkedIn, if you are not already and if you’d like to connect. And then I also have a weekly, purple me up blog kind of thing, where I post, and send out like weekly market to, engage specific top tips and, some useful information that a lot of people, appreciate. So if you are not already, if you aren’t already, join me there. And if you would like to join me there, please, scan the QR code and, yeah, join the weekly, subscription, list. So. Yeah. Thank you.
Now, let’s get going before we get started, let’s do a quick poll, about segmentation. So since this topic is, about segmentation, I would like to know, like, what, you know, what your experiences around with the segmentation and you think it would be helpful as well to know, just this with everyone. So, if you can see the poll on your screen, like, there are like four of, you know, few options, and you might have to scroll down a little bit to, see all the options. The first option is I haven’t used it, but I would like to use it, but just to support a one off use case. Yes. I have used it to support multiple use cases. I would like to learn more about it. I am a segmentation pro, and, then there is option not, what? So feel free to, punch in your segmentation. You know your answer to this question. I will wait for a few seconds.
Awesome, awesome.
Allow the participation rate. Thanks, everyone.
Amazing. Now, let’s end the poll. Amazing. Like, as anticipated, we have, like, a majority of people have already used segmentation, for supporting multiple use cases. And they would like to learn more about it. And you are at the right place. Awesome. So, there are a couple that a few people who would, who haven’t used, don’t have experience with segmentation. So I already have a couple of slides. You can take that as a refresher for the people who are like segmentation pro and have supported multiple use cases, we won’t be spending a ton of time here. But, just to set the context and set the stage right will be covering the, going through the quick segmentation refresher, what it is, what it is and what like why do we use it in Marketo? So in Marketo, as you would, know, like we have a database and data like you have your people, their, prospects, customers, etc… So if you want to create, set, like if you want to segment your people, how do you do it? Segmentation is the answer. So you would then say like we have smart list and then like then there are differences between smart list and segmentation. And I have a dedicated slide, you know, going through the some of the very important and advanced differences between those two, but talking about segmentation. So you can create segmentation by going to data based segmentation, then new and new segmentation. It allows in a nutshell allows you to create the logical groups of people in Marketo engage basis. Some of these filters that and the filter selection would depend on, your strategy on how you want to create those logical groups of people. Then some of the uses of segmentation. So using segmentation you can improve your engagement rates and conversion rates of course. Then fit the segmentation to find you can send the right content to the right people at the right time. That would ultimately announce the customer experience through personalized messaging can also use, Velocity Template language, in order to hyper personalize the content based on the segment membership. And of course, it’s easy to set up and use and updates real time and like, Smart List. And I have a reasoning why I set an like, smart list and b, going forward through that in the next slide. But some of the, benefits of segmentation again, you can use it in your email campaigns. Person scoring person journey, lead life cycle journey in your email compliance, setup as well. And of course, you can do segment wise analytics and reporting.
Now, the slide that I was talking about is the slide where I’m detailing all the major differences between segmentation versus smart list, basically, superficial differences, we all know. But there are some of the major differences between these two that, I think, you know, helps, market to users to select the right one, segmentation or smartly space is that use case. So first one is the update update cadence. So segmentation always update in real time. So as soon as an update is made, being made in the database, the person segmentation changes based on based on that update. So if they qualify for segment two then their segmentation would change. However, when it comes to Smart List, Smart List doesn’t update, unless you go to that smart list or that Smart list is being referenced. By another smart list or by a, campaign. So that’s one of the major difference. And then there’s use case related, difference as well, with segmentation. As I said, you can use that in your velocity scripting. Like if a person belongs to segment A, you would want to send them, particular piece of content. You can not reference Smart List membership, in your velocity template language. And as soon as a segmentation update is being made, a activity, is recorded in the activity log of the person smart list. On the other end, there are no activity recorded for the smart list changes. And of course, segmentation. There’s a like they are restricted a bit in terms of the num like number and type of filters that you can use, while in the Smart list to get the complete, and full set of filters, including all the activity filters. And there are some of the filters that you don’t get in segmentation that you definitely get in Smart List. For example, member of Smart List. You can not use that in segmentation, but you can use that in smart list and approval process. With segmentation, it’s a bit, longer when it comes, to segmentation. However, on the smart list, you just add the filters, and you are done with the segmentation. There is like couple of steps which we’ll see in the next few slides. Then, you know, with this basics covered before we dive into the review and update process of segmentation and why that’s important, I again have one poll and I, I promise this is the last poll.
So, the question is pretty simple. I would like to know how often do you review, and or update or segmentation like, like do you do one time every quarter, one time every six months? And like six months, one time every year or, more or you, you never update. It’s like, set it and forget it.
Again, you might have to scroll a bit to see all the options.
And again, I, when I started learning marketing, I was under the impression that, segmentation one set. We don’t need to update it. But over the time, as I, learned from my experience, worked with multiple clients, I got to know that review and update is pretty important. So no issues if you are at, if you are at the last option, that is not set it in for good for us. I have worked with a lot of customers that, that are there. So yeah.
Okay, let’s end the poll.
I’m amazing. Most of the participants there is a tie between one next every year or more. And then. No it’s setting. Forget it for us. So yeah, again you are the right place. So now let’s answer, let’s, answer the most important question. Why a periodic review and updates for segmentation is important. So I have slides where I will be discussing the process etc… But let’s first understand why the periodic review and updates are important. So the first, major reason in my opinion is the behavioral changes. So in today’s world, you know, the entire marketing landscape is dynamics. And so other people so behavioral changes, are something that we see, a lot, you know, more often, in today’s world, like people, people are very creative. They, they, they like both in terms of, prospect customers as well as the marketers, from marketers. Then we continue adding more channels so as to reach people like prospects on every single platform that they are there. So again, that entails the behavioral changes. And in order to ensure that the behavioral changes as and when they happen, we also, ensure that those are encountered, and, you know, continuing with the segmentation. So, the segmentation logic and the filtering logic and the way that you segment people, that should also change, as in when behavioral changes, in order to account for those changes, one of the next important, you know, why why periodic review and updates of segmentation is data freshness. So as and when these behavioral changes happen, you would be adding, you know, you will be, deleting the obsolete fields or you may be adding, new, newer fields to your forms or, your other marketing, mix. Then you will be and, on top of that, there might be a case where you will be adding a data enrichment platform. So you are getting more data. You are updating your, data collection strategy. And in order to account for those changes, you would want, your segmentation to be up to date. So you see, if you have added, like, you know, two different like two new fields, two new demographic fields to your form, you would want to ensure that those two new fields are also accounted for, in your, segmentation as well, if applicable.
And then marketing underperformance. And this is one of the place where I would also like to discuss a small, customer case study. So one of the customers that I worked with, they, they had a like they were doing like over segmentation, they had a ton of segments that they never needed it, but they created it because they thought it would be really cool to be able to send, you know, different content to people belonging to different, segment, different country in different languages, etc… But when we viewed their email performance report, when we segmented it by the, segment membership, there were, very less, you know, conversions or email clicks or, or points and even, down the funnel conversions were really low from the segmentations that they had. That clearly meant that all the effort that they are putting into, you know, sending the personalized content to that segmentation is not working out. So monitoring the, campaign performance, email performance and ensuring that is it’s in line, with the effort that you are putting in with respect to creating those personalized content for your segment. It’s really important.
Next is the business changes. So if your companies, bring in more products, if you are, if your company is being acquired by another company or vice versa, if you are acquiring that company, then, you might be entering newer markets, you might be, you know, starting to, market more products, more business lines, supporting more business lines. So as in when those business changes happen, it’s really important for you to ensure that segmentation logic and the way that you, you know, segment people, that also changes. And of course, it’s in line with the changes, business changes and again, GDPR compliance. So if you are, moving into a new territory, moving into anywhere geography where there are different GDPR compliance requirements, then you would want your segmentation to update to ensure that those are in line, with with the local GDPR and compliance requirements to which you are you’re not marketing. So next, we are gonna be discussing on the process of, reviewing and updating your segmentation. So there are a couple of steps where I will be discussing the review process and then couple of steps I will be discussing the update process. And this is a high level, view. I have like two dedicated slides where I will be going to the review an entire update process in detail. So the first step in your review process should be to access the segmentation rule. So you should be going over to your database section, in Marketo going over to the segmentation and view all the segmentations. And there are there are, there could be times where you have a lot of segmentation. Those are in approved, you know, approved stages, but you don’t really need them. They have begun or they have become obsolete over time. So identify all the relevant segmentation and consider, you know, an approving or like, you know, archiving the segmentation that you don’t really need and aren’t using it.
And of course, this is an extension to what I just said, and for the relevant segmentations, identify all the segments that you have. Each segment criteria and number of people that are in each and the default segment. So this is really important. So if you do not already have a document, specifying the criteria of the segmentation that you have at this point in time, you would want to create one.
And then these two steps are with regards to the review and the next down. As I said, these are in regards with the segmentations. So, update segmentation. So if you, if you want to update your segmentation, you would want to select the segmentation that you would want to update. And I always recommend going segmentation by segmentation. So if you have like five different segmentations which you are actively using, you you should be focusing on one segmentation at a time. And if you if you have like multiple teams to support you, you can divide the segmentation amongst, the different teams. And again, the process is pretty simple. You would want to create, actions, then edit and modify the criteria for each segmentation in the smart list. And the updated criteria should be relevant, you know, relevant by the reflecting current insights. And if you have any newer demographic or bigger fields that you would have added, you would want to encounter for that.
Then the last step is preview and test changes. Before you would want to hit the button on the segmentation, you would want to, like thoroughly test your segmentation and ensure that the updates that you made, those are in line, with the expected updates like, that you want to make. And a lot of people skip the test, part. But I really emphasize on ensuring the total testing of all the, segmentations and in fact, all the assets that you create within, Marketo. I, you know, emphasize on that through testing before writing the approval.
So now let’s, dive it, but, a little bit deeper in the segmentation review process. So as I said, you would want to go to the database section and identify all the active segmentations that you have and identify the ones that are relevant to you. So and once you have done that and of course, I would I always recommend my customers going segmentation by segmentation instead of, you know, at a time, reviewing like 10 or 5 different segmentation, that that creates a bit confusion. So open up one of, the segmentation that you want to review. See all the segments that.
And then once you are done with that go segment by segment within the segmentation itself. So I would want to so for example, in the snapshot that you see, I have opened up the India segment, I see the filtering criterion. This is, one of the simpler filtering, criteria. But, there could be cases where you will be having like, multiple filters with advanced logic, and you would want to document that as well.
So this process is basically ensuring that, you know, what the, what state in the system. What’s that? The root stage. So that’s why the review process is important. And this step you determine, do you really need an update or the one that you have in the root state. It’s fine. And it aligns with our marketing objective. So, if you if you if you identify that you want to update your segmentation so that are, again, detailed steps that I have identified. So you would want to create a draft first, and then as soon as you create a draft, you will see all the segmentation draft that’s been created. So if you have assets like emails, landing pages, etc. that are using the segmentations, those will continue, using the approved version while you, you know, make any updates to the draft version.
So you would want to go, segment by segment, update the filtering criteria. And this is really, one of the most important steps. So you would want to ensure that, the filtering steps are the filtering criteria that you enter here. They are correct. And at this point between 2 and 3, you would also want to have, updated criteria document where you will have all the segments and their newer, of criteria identified. And based on that criteria document, you would want to set your smart list, for each segment. And again, once you are done with that, you would want also want to create a thorough testing document. Again, this is something that is, you know, not followed by a lot of people. And they directly, skip after doing the third step, they directly skip to the approved, segmentation and approve update step. I do not recommend that. I, always recommend, people to create very, thorough testing scenarios document to ensure that, all the edge cases are specially covered. And once you are done with the thorough testing, you can prove the segmentation.
And if you, if you want to approve the draft version itself to ensure that, like to do further testing, you can always add test filters, in the smart list and then to the testing. So that’s also one of the possible ways.
Now I also like to discuss some of the best practice pertaining to the, segmentation review and update process.
So the first step, the first best practice is to ensure that the, the segmentation, logic that you have that aligns with the marketing objective, your ex should always be, you know, in alignment with your strategy. So that’s what, you know, it’s very important. And then simplify segmentation. I cannot also emphasize this. More so ensure that the logic, the filtering criteria that you have, it’s in one of the most simplest way possible. You would not want to over complicated segmentation. And then there are like implications if you overcomplicate your segmentation. And I have one slide. Discussing that as well.
And of course use audience insights. So if your, audience’s behavior is changing, if you are adding in more demographic fields, if your audience preferences are change, changing, you would want to use those insights to ensure that the segmentations, logic in the way that you segment people that are in line with, those, audience insights. And then compliance checks. So, again, I, I would like to discuss one of the, case studies here. So one of the customers is, you know, one of the customers, they expanded into new, newer geographies, and they, they were using the, regular smart List approach to be able to, drive their email compliance campaigns and that, that wasn’t really scalable, given that they had, like, multiple geographies supporting now. So, again, we switched them over to the segmentation way we created segmentation for, each of the different geographies that they were marketing to. And then within each of the segment, we, added the, you know, the criteria for the person to be marketable. And then we, relaunched their entire email compliance campaign using segmentation. So if you are updating your segmentation in case these and later on this customer, also added like new, newer geographies. So it was really easy for us to, you know, navigate the updates once we had moved over the segmentation. So if you are moving over to new geographies and show that, your segmentation logic is also not, accurate. And frequency of updates. So establishing rate regular review cycle could be quarterly, biannually based on the number of segmentation that you have. And you know how often do things senior Marketo for marketing instance changes.
And then test test test I cannot emphasize this more again. So a lot of people, as I have said multiple times, they don’t test their updates. They just, hit the approve and then they identify that they have been sending the wrong content, to the wrong set of people and that that doesn’t drive, you know, marketing performance. And that’s like, it causes like, waste of resources and time.
So, again, I would also like to emphasize the monitor segmentation performance. So, as I had said earlier, you would want to ensure that your, like the emails that you are sending based on the segmentation membership, those are, you know, like those are really driving results. So one way to do that is creating an email performance report. And in the setup tab you would want to group people by segmentation. And there you can see how many people from each of these segment, are interacting with your emails. So you would want to monitor that periodically to ensure that your segmentation logic, it’s up to date and it’s working.
And again, monitor segmentation performance. So one way is to see one way to monitor segmentation performance is to actually see the campaign. Q so if you see a lot of campaigns in your campaign, Q that means your instance is busy and, it’s not able to make the updates, in real time. So that means that segmentation could be one of the areas where you can improve on. So one way would be to, you know, revise the filtering logic so that it’s simpler. It’s not over complicated.
And towards the end I would also like to discuss some the fixes should not, you know, or segment, like your segmentation. You would not want to create, too many segments within a segmentation that could like for each segment, you would have to probably create a, new set of content and managing those, lower level of segmentation could be, difficult. And monitoring those could also be difficult. And again, it also, you know, causes system to use processes and, you know, resources to maintain the segmentation tail segments. So segments are not refresh like segments are always refreshed when there’s any new data or any updates to the existing people. Records are made. So, if, if, if you have added new fields or if your, if you are capturing more demographic fields, you would want to ensure that you update your segmentation. And again, misaligned rules, in case your segment is not aligned with, overall marketing objective, I don’t think that’s going to drive results. So ensure that, your segmentation logic, aligns with your overall marketing strategy. And again, don’t overcomplicate your, segmentation logic.
I have some next steps script, next steps for you. You know, once you are done, with this webinar, I would want you to go back to your Marketo instance, identify the relevant segmentations, schedule, regular like audit sessions where you, review your segmentation and, see how they have been set up. And of course, try to simplify and optimize the rules, for each of the segmentations and incorporate data insights as well. So see how people can interacting with, your emails for each segmentation and then, incorporate those updates in your segmentation, regular or even update process. And again, finally test before you, hit that approval.
So I have a quick, appendix as well. And I think this will be included, once we send out this, deck so you can review those. And I think that could also be included, in the interactive webinars. I’m not sure, but, you know, there are a couple of resources, few resources that, you can review, as well.
So, yeah, let’s move on to questions now. I’m gonna get he’s asking, that they’ve been using in third country in their segments. And, he feels that it’s useless because hybrid work is common. So, and he’s curious if it, it’s ever good to use it for anything. And I think, this is true. I really don’t recommend people and I think that, most market users would agree with me that, in Ford country or any of the informed fields, they’re not really, dependable. They are just an indicative, you know, indicative measure of where a person could be, as the name suggests, it’s inferred based on the, ISP that they are connecting, from or filling out your form or interacting with their marketing assets. So I would not recommend using, in Ford Fields instead. I would really recommend this to, you know, have those demographic fields, including the country, state, etc., on your, global marketing forms as well. This would, mean, like, you have your, you know, those fields on your progressive as well as your contact sales form or a hairdresser form so that any time, person fills out the form, they, they fill in their country and you get their, that, like that actual country value and use that to segment people. So in what country is something that I would really not recommend? Yeah. And a lot of time you do your segmentation like language segmentation based on like country segment, like country segmentation. And if you are using in first country, as one of the parameters, then it could mean that there’s high chance that you might be sending, no wrong translated content out to people. So yeah.
Yeah. One of the questions, again, very interesting question. What’s the best way to ensure default segment is not the largest? So this so, you know, when your default segment is having like, a major chunk of the people, then, you know, that means that you would want to update your segmentation, logic that simply means that the filtering logic that you have in your rest of the non default segment, those are not able to filtering, you know, significant number of people. So if you have any of your personalized content, you know, emails landing pages based on segmentation, membership, most of the people are not gonna get most of the people are gonna get the all default version. So that’s one of the Q that you would want to, you know, update your segmentation, logic.
And what’s the best way to ensure default segment is not the largest. So, you would want to see what type of, you know, like what type of people are there in the default segmentation. And are there any more fields, that you can add to the rest of the segments, the non default segments, so that you are able to, you know, apportion people from the default segment over to the non default segments. And of course ensuring that the updated criteria, is still in line with your overall overall marketing strategy the way that you want to, you know, segment your audience. It’s still matching. It’s still in line with that. So I think that would be one of the ways that you can start around, like looking at the people in the default segment and see how you can, you know, update your non default segments so that people start to move out of the dif, default segment.
And one of the, questions that I see a lot of people are asking is what are the top examples of segmentations that you recommend using? So, one of the top, examples, one of like I have seen a lot of, marketers use the language specific segmentation. So, you can create a language, segmentation. And in that segmentation you can have segments specific to different countries that you market. And then you can use that segment membership, in order to send the translated content like content in the local language. So for example, you can have, you know, like a Spain, like a segmentation, like a segment for Spain, a different segment for, you know, Italy, France, etc… And then you can use the segment membership as, criteria to send the translated content, you know, the emails, landing pages, etc… And another good example would be, the email compliance segmentation. I think I discussed that during during the session. So I think those are some of the really good examples. And if you have like, specific personas identified, if you have some specific personas already identified, and that applies to, you know, your entire database and you are using that across multiple campaigns. So instead of creating, different like individual smart list for each of the specific persona, you just might, want to create a segmentation out of it.
And again, if there is any of the use cases where you want to use the velocity scripting, and like combine the power of velocity scripting, along with the segment membership, you know, definitely go with the segmentation because Smart List membership is something that you cannot reference in the, velocity template language. So if you have velocity like those hyper personalization kind of use cases, I would definitely recommend, using the segmentation.
Okay. And then there’s one question. What if we have multiple fields in our segmentation. Some of the fields are in conflict. So if if there are fields in the conflict then I think, they would not yeah, they would not qualify for that particular segment. Then they would likely go to the default segmentation in case of conflict. So if you are sending out emails based on segment membership, they would likely get the yeah, they would likely get the default catch all content.
Thanks to our show. Just out of curiosity, what type of questions that you have, commonly got from your, you know, work, and working with customers directly on auditing their segmentation.
So on based on the auditing segmentation, the common questions that customers ask is that, like if they have been using, like this one, segmentation and they have been using across multiple emails and landing pages, then what would be the best way to kind of audit? Because, they have a global segmentation and their segmentation has like multiple parameters. How would they go about, auditing it? So, the only thing that I recommend is that to ensure that the segmentation, criteria, the filtering, criteria basis, which you create, your segments, it’s in line with, you know, the overall, lead management framework that you have. So, for example, in your lead management framework, if you have a progressive profiling form, and that’s one of the global forms that you are using in that form has, you know, some of the demographic fields, and you would want to ensure that those demographic fields are always, included in your segmentation, the relevant demographic fields. And if you have certain assets, like certain really high value asset spaces, which if you want to also create segmentation and, 1% dynamic content. So for example, if there’s like there are people who have filled out the Henderson form and if you want to send out like dedicated content to them, show the dedicated landing page experience to them. So I would also, ensure that, like you auditor segmentation to ensure that these tabs or these filtering logic are also included in their, segmentations. And like a thorough documentation is also something that I, really recommend. So at all times you should have a most up to date, document that outlines the, you know, all the segmentations that you have. And preferably where they are used and also why they are used there. So a lot of times, you know, due to turnover, like, you know, people like, leave the company and then the people who are there, like, they don’t, know why the segmentation is being used, in certain place. So I always recommend a thorough documentation. And that’s really helpful during the audit process. If you.
Thanks for sharing that. So we could take, maybe three more questions. We do have lots of great questions. So, I’ll let you decide which one you want to go first.
Okay. There’s, one really great question. So.
The, question is about, like, the addressing region, and they will not be sending to all of the regions. Will this break or cause any problems with the email deployment or default content? So not really. So if you have so any type like segment membership is a, mutually exclusive thing. So if you have, segment for one of the regions, like if you are marketing to say ten different regions, and if you are segmenting just pieces like 3 or 4 regions, so all the people in the remaining regions for which you should not have any segment, you know, define they will be going to the default, segment. So if you have like for kind of like for now sets of personalized content that would be serving to each of these segments. So rest of the people will be, you know, of course, we, sent the default catch all content. So it’s not really, important for you to be able to I mean, it’s it’s a different thing that you need it or not need it, but technically, Marketo won’t stop you from, you know, creating and defining a segmentation with just a subset of the regions to know which you are marketing. So, yeah, technically it’s possible strategically is, yeah, I would recommend it. Not is something that I would want to, you know, have like a deeper conversation, like should you be doing that or not. But yeah, technically it’s possible.
Okay. Is, nested if statement is a good way to build segment. So, as I said, like you can not reference the, number of Smart List. I believe you are asking, like, if you can reference member of Smart List in a segment membership or not. But yeah, you cannot do that. You cannot nest smart list. In your segmentation, logic. So yeah.
Okay. This is really good question to end. So if we need a pretty like if I think dementia if they have a pretty large database and they want to like pretty targeted audience, would it be better to use a complicated segment or a smart list? What is better in terms of system load and avoiding camping execution delay? So yeah, that’s a really great question. So, I would always recommend, like if you have like a lot of, like if, if you have a lot of filtering criteria, say for example, you feel like have know 4 or 5 different fields and you might also be referencing activity data and bases that if you want to, you know, segment or your audience, I would go with the smart list. However, if you want to send out the personalized content to these people, and if you want to leverage the dynamic content, you know, feature in Marketo, in this email editor where you can, you know, set the time in dynamic content basis, the segmentation membership, then I would, go with the segmentation. However, if you want to just, reference these, audiences and say smart campaign or your smart list or your just reporting stuff, you are better off the smart list. But when it comes to sending out the personalized content via email landing pages, I would, definitely go with the segmentation. It might affect the campaign execution delay because segmentation are, you know, always updated in real time. You know, in contrast to the smart List, which are updated only when they’re referenced or when you, you know, view the people in the Smart List tab. So, however, you can always try to, you know, reduce the complexity, of like of your segmentation, criteria. So, yeah, it really depends on the purpose that you would want to use. If it’s for operations, go with the smart list. If it’s for subbing out the personalized content, try to, you know, reduce the complexity of your segmentation and like, you know, criteria and then create a segmentation in out of it.
Right. So we are now at 850, am in Pacific time. So, we thank everyone for joining us today and asking a lot of great questions, for those questions that, we weren’t able to get to live, we’ll be working with, our show offline to get those addressed, and we’ll be sharing his, input on Marketing Nation community. So I recommend you to follow along on Marketing Nation community. Those link would also be, provided in our follow up email. And please continue to, continue that discussions. And, we hope you enjoy today’s sessions and we will love to see you in our future webinar. So thanks again for joining and thanks again for our shows. Exciting and, inspiration and presentation.
Key Takeaways
Importance of Segmentation
- Segmentation in Marketo Engage allows for creating logical groups of people based on specific filters, which helps in improving engagement and conversion rates through personalized messaging.
Differences Between Segmentation and Smart Lists
- Segmentation updates in real-time, while Smart Lists update only when referenced.
- Segmentation can be used in Velocity Scripting for hyper-personalized content, whereas Smart Lists cannot.
- Segmentation has a more complex approval process compared to Smart Lists.
Periodic Review and Updates
- Regularly review and update Segmentation to account for behavioral changes, data freshness, marketing performance, business changes, and GDPR compliance.
- Establish a regular review cycle (quarterly, biannually, etc.).
Best Practices
- Ensure Segmentation logic aligns with marketing objectives.
- Simplify Segmentation criteria to avoid over complication.
- Use audience insights to update Segmentation.
- Conduct compliance checks and monitor Segmentation performance.
- Thoroughly test Segmentation updates before approval.
Common Issues and Solutions
- Avoid over-Segmentation to prevent system overload and manageability issues.
- Address misaligned rules to ensure Segmentation supports overall marketing strategy.
- Monitor default segment size to ensure it is not the largest, indicating a need for better Segmentation criteria.
Examples of Effective Segmentation
- Language-specific Segmentation for sending translated content.
- Email compliance Segmentation for different geographies.
Technical Considerations
- Use Smart Lists for operational purposes and Segmentation for sending personalized content.
- Reduce complexity in Segmentation criteria to avoid campaign execution delays.
Additional Resources
- Presentation Slides
- Join the discussion thread on Marketing Nation Community
- Create a Segmentation
- Edit a Segmentation
- Marketo Engage Success Series - Segmentation
- Segmentation Health Check Updates - Tips and Tricks for keeping your Segmentation Updated
- Email Performance Report