This is a must see video:

Demographics like industry, location, job position, etc. have always been used to define our customer profiles. However, today’s customers are educating themselves with information on the internet. This freely accessible information is framing their purchasing decisions.

Smart marketers are using niches and personas to tailor their message to the specific needs of customers through relevant conversations. Personas extend beyond demographics. They define the characteristics, current conditions and influencers of your audience. Ultimately personas give us a way to recognize and talk the “language” of the many types of people that our products or services can help.

Thinking about these facts I realized it was time to really define our company niches and personas. I’ve always had them “in mind” but it wasn’t until I actually wrote them down that I started to understand the benefits the process can bring.

Creating Our Company’s Personas

The first thing I did was to open my trusty spreadsheet and define our niches. Niches are different from personas and are a subset of your customers providing a narrow focus for better content targeting. There can be many personas in a niche.

Once I defined some of my top niches I moved on to define the personas for our Email Marketing niche. Right here is where I had my “duh!” moment. I realized that what I was trying to create in my spreadsheet was an outline with deeper and deeper levels of detail that defined my personas.

My “duh!” was that calc{list}’s outline lists are perfect for this. Just like everyone else my natural reaction is to put everything in a spreadsheet. Using calc{list} makes defining personas much easier and can be later used for organizing campaigns themselves.

Create Niches & Personas

In calc{list} I created the {Marketing Niches} list and entered persona types for each niche. For brevity we’ll focus on our “Email Marketing” niche. Its five personas are the types of professionals that would be directly interested in our product for that niche.

Create B2B Persona Categories

Ardath Albee’s new book “eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale” is a complete guide to creating content that captures your audience’s attention and moves them through the sales process. She has a great chapter on persona building that I highly recommend.

In her book she explains how B2B personas are different from consumer personas. She says; “Personal characteristics are important, but B2B personas must recognize that the prospect’s professional standing and priorities will hold additional sway over what catches his attention when it comes time to solve a business issue.”

She continues to expand upon her B2B persona definition which I used as the framework for six personas categories. I will later expand upon each category with reference to our product. A quick synopsis of the six:

• Problems Needing to be Solved: These are problems that tend to remain on the forefront of their mind and possible pain points.
• Current Environment: Are there any obstacles to taking action on purchasing our product? These may include political conditions, lack of consensus on how to fix a problem, budgetary constraints, etc.
• Strategic Business and Career Goals: Are there viable business outcomes that achieve company goals? Also, will it help personal career advancement?
• Preferences and Aversions: What is their predisposition or perspective to solving the problem? Do they favor opportunities or risk mitigation?
• Competitive Considerations: Does our product help them differentiate their company from the competition? Does the solution create an advantage or make them equal to competitors?
• Influencers: Who can influence the buying process? Colleagues, stakeholders, users, champions, consultants, external peers.

I created my six standard persona categories for each persona type. These categories help me develop a more complete persona definition.

Create Persona Details

Now remember each node in our {Marketing Niches} list is also a list. This means that we can simply double-click any node to open up that particular list. Below you will see that I have opened the {Small Business Owner} and {Marketing Professional} lists.

Notice that my {Small Business Owner} list’s description area holds a short story about the Owner which is used to further focus our persona details.

Next I filled out the final details of my personas. When comparing them side by side you can easily see that my “Small Business Owner”, who manages the company’s marketing activities, has a much different perspective than my “Marketing Professional” persona.

As you work through all the categories you’ll see your personas come alive as real people with specific needs. Be sure to approach them from the perspective of your customer. It’s really kind of exciting.

Persona Grata

Persona Grata: Fully acceptable or welcome. Defining niches and their personas will indeed be a welcome new tool to help your marketing content reflect the interests of your customers. This will go a long way to moving your buyers further down the sales cycle. I know personas have really given our campaigns a boost.

Remember we’ve created these personas to use as a guide to create marketing content that will be more engaging and relevant to our customers. Revisit your personas often and don’t be afraid to change and refine them as time goes by.

Much More…

As you know, calc{list} is much more than a way to create outlines. In fact, one way I’m going to use our new {Marketing Niches} list is to actually store and organize contact results from campaigns. This will take another post to fully explain but in effect I’ll be able to review and compare my personas to our marketing results.

A hint for you calc{list} experts: I can simply drop any list that our campaigns produce wherever it is relevant in the {Marketing Niches} list. Example: Place our {Email #1} list into both the {Lead Generation} and {IT Department} detail lists because this email addresses both of these persona issues.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

(Part 1)

Now that we have created our Triple Core Lists (TCL) and used calc{list}’s outline list type to organize our  “New Product” campaign let’s prepare for our second mailing.

Right off the bat we know we want to use our first email’s TCL to split this next mailing into two relevant messages; one for those in the {Opened} list and another for the {No Action} list. 

We are going to intrigue the first email respondents with some additional helpful content and a gentle nudge further down our sales cycle. So we will create another outline list called {Email #2 – More New Features}. This will be the container list for our #2 email’s TCL.

After we do that let’s create a new list called {Sent – Email #1 – Opened} and drag our original {Opened} list from #1 email into it. Now when it recalculates it has the same contacts as {Opened}. Effectively we have created a second list to rename* the original {Opened}.

To finish #2 email’s TCL we drag and drop {Sent – Email #1 – Opened} into our container list {Email #2 – More New Features}. Whenever we return to our {Email #2 – More New Features} list in the future we will quickly see that we sent the email to people who opened Email #1.

Now what do we do with the people that did not respond to the #1 email? Maybe they just didn’t notice it or didn’t have time to open it. We could just re-send the original but I would suggest that you send them the same email with a different subject line. Subtle changes can have a large impact on your email performance. 

So to set up our #3 email’s TLC we go through the same process as we did for #2’s but this time we use the {No Action} list instead of the {Opened} list. Our {Email #3 – New Revised} list will always show us that we sent the email to people who did NOT open Email #1.

Our email campaign can now continue sending both the 2^nd & 3^rd emails out at the same time. We have effectively branched our campaign using our #1 email’s Triple Core Lists. By doing this we have created target messages based on customer response.

Of course, the branching process doesn’t stop here. We need to capture the final TCL of the 2nd & 3rd emails when the results are in. Even if we don’t want to continue with this specific email campaign, the TCL may contribute to a future campaign.

This was a very simple example of how we can capture and organize our contact email lists. You can develop the naming methods and list organization that best suits your needs. You may even want to incorporate Opt-Outs, Clicks and Forwards into your branching strategies.

There is virtually no limit to how you can use and re-use your email lists in calc{list}. So make sure you’re capturing the Triple Core Lists to make all of your campaigns relevant and profitable!

If you use email marketing services like iContact, Constant Contact® or MailChimp® you can be sure calc{list}® will make your campaigns easier to manage.

Does this give you any ideas?

* There is a special type of calc{list} called “View” which is much more efficient for list renaming but to keep the example simple I didn’t want to introduce a new list type.

Join our mailing list.

After every email you send it is essential that you capture and evaluate to whom the emails where sent, who opened them and who didn’t open them. I call these the “Triple Core Lists” because these lists will help your follow-up emails offer greater value and relevance.

In short, you need to engage and nurture your customers with targeted relevant content. This means your campaign should branch or take more than one path based on how people respond to your original emails.

In this post I will review how to create and organize your Triple Core Lists for effective list management and improve your email marketing campaign performance. Please review the post “Ready… Fire!” for a full discussion on the importance of targeted email content and persona building.

We’ll begin our example with the assumption that we have an email that has already been sent. If you used calc{list} then rename the original list to {Sent}. If not, just import the recipients into a list called {Sent}.

For the second list you need to import the people who opened your email. We’ll call this list {Opened}. Now we have two out of three of our TCL by simply importing.

The third list {No Action} is important because we want to continue our campaign differently for those who did not respond to our first email.

Let’s put calc{list}’s calculating lists to work. Create a new list named {No Action}. Drag and drop both {Sent} and {Opened} into {No Action} and mark {Opened} to be Removed. Now calculate and we have the final TCL {No Action} that holds all the people that did not respond to our email!

Now we need a container list for our Triple Core Lists. Create a new list but this time create an “Outline” list which does NOT calculate contacts. It is used to store and organize other lists. Let’s name it  after the email we sent {Email #1 – All New!} and drag the TCL’s into it.

At this point we have successfully created our Triple Core Lists for our first email “All New!”. It was quick and easy. Remember we are capturing these lists so that we can use them anytime in the future to better target our marketing content.

Let’s add one additional list so we can organize and manage our entire campaign. We’ll create another outline list called {New Product Campaign} and place the {Email #1 – All New!} inside. So as our campaign progresses we will continue to add TCL for each email we send.

This last screen shot shows {Email #1 – All New!} in the expanded view. You can quickly open any of these lists with a simple double-click. Are you starting to see how we use calc{list} to not only capture and calculate email lists but also to organize all the lists that we need to manage?

In Part 2 of our post we will examine how to use the Triple Core Lists to send out our next New Product campaign emails. Can you guess what we’ll do next? Hint: Take a branch of history…

+BAL

Join our mailing list.

You’ve probably never thought about calculating contacts but you do it all the time! Let’s say you’re going to have a meeting. In your head you think; I need to invite Sam and Jill from Marketing, in Engineering I want Mike but definitely not Nick, and finally Matt, Tammy and Sue from production.

There, you are calculating contacts. You chose people from various groups (departments), included some and excluded others. That is how calc{list} works too.

Calc{list} is a list of people: your contacts. The list name defines the group, category, task, activity, or stage people are in. The lists can be combined to make new dynamic lists that automatically calculate to a new group of people.

Take a look at the calc{list} in edit mode below. Notice that the {Newsletter} contains both contacts and other (nested) lists such as {Customers}. Additionally, some lists are marked to indicate how they should be calculated. For example, contacts in {Opt Out} are to be excluded from the final list.

On the right is the {Newsletter} after it has been calculated. The thing to remember is that a calculated list always returns only one instance of a contact. So if a contact is in several of the lists, contained in the edit area, the contact will still only appear once in the final calculated list.

EDIT MODE                                                    CALCULATED

Pretty simple, right? Now let’s dig a little deeper and look at how lists can be Static or Dynamic. If there were only contacts listed in the {Newsletter} edit area the list would be considered static because after calculation the list would never change without re-editing the contacts in the edit area again.

However, our {Newsletter} is dynamic because it contains other nested lists. This is exciting because what this means is that when we add new contacts to the {Customers} list our {Newsletter} list is re-calculate automatically and includes the new contacts. List management has never been this easy!

Are you starting to see how powerful calculating lists can be? Keep exploring, there are many more features to calc{list} with Passive Automation.

Join our mailing list.