Hacking Sales

Chapter 7Segmenting

The first message you send to prospective customers is absolutely crucial, so this first-touch e-mail needs to work in your favor. The only way to personalize your messaging in a scalable manner is to get really good at segmenting your lists. This allows you to hit a full list with a note that is tailored to all of them yet is still fairly general.

Here's an example of how a company called The Storefront used segmenting to properly personalize their message at scale.

The Storefront was a marketplace for pop-up shops and short-term retail rentals. When it opened in cities across the United States, The Storefront needed to market its services to both landlords and retailers, so it found websites in which the contact details for landlords (Yelp, Tripadvisor) and for retailers (Etsy, Kickstarter) were listed.

The Storefront then used Import.io to extract all contact details from the websites into neatly ordered lists, which it could export into Google Docs. When The Storefront extracted contact details, it also extracted as much additional information about the leads as possible. The Storefront used this additional information to further segment lists so that it could create message templates that generated highly personalized messages for each lead.

One way The Storefront segmented the lists was by neighborhood. When it was building the list for New York City retail spaces, The Storefront scraped space listings from Yelp. This gave it all the contact information ...