How to Build a Highly Effective Targeted Marketing List

Have you ever looked at your email response rates and wondered what you’re getting wrong?

“Is our messaging off? Are we getting marked as spam? Is our offer just not that competitive?”

Maybe.

More commonly, though, it’s because the marketing email list you’re working with isn’t targeted enough.

In other words, you might be chasing too broad an audience, where the majority of the people you’re calling and emailing just aren’t a fit for your product or service in the first place.

In this article, we’ll explore the importance of highly targeted marketing lists.

We’ll discuss why it’s worth investing time in building one and what factors you can use to segment your business lists.

Then, we’ll share four inside tips for creating effective business email lists that drive revenue success.

What is a marketing list?

So, what exactly are marketing lists?

They’re lists of prospective or current customers that a company would like to outreach to.

Marketing email lists are often used to strengthen relationships, increase awareness, and even increase conversion rates for low-lift activities like attending a webinar.

Why building a targeted marketing list is worth your time

What’s the point of creating a targeted list exactly?

Let’s do a little bit of arithmetic to demonstrate.

Say you’ve just acquired a list of companies in a new vertical you’re expanding into. 10,000 shiny new leads that your sales team can load into their pipeline and go after.

But here’s what you’re missing:

• 2,000 of those companies don’t have enough employees to meet the minimum user count of your most basic plan.
• 1,000 are brand-new startups and don’t have enough revenue to afford your tool.
• 1,500 of them don’t have a valid use case for your product.
• And 500 of them are actually going out of business and are likely to shut up shop in the next six months.

That leaves 5,000 B2B companies to tap into.

Except 2,000 of those companies are already using a competitor tool, and it’s one that you never win deals from — let’s say that you’re an early-stage company and haven’t yet built out enterprise-facing features that those businesses need.

So, out of that original list of 10,000 potential customers, only 3,000 are worth putting into a sales and marketing email campaign.

But the thing is, you didn’t put in the time upfront to create a more targeted mailing list. Instead, you put all 10,000 leads into a GTM motion.

This meant that 7 out of 10 emails sent, LinkedIn touchpoints programmed, or calls made were a waste of time, money, and resources.

That’s where targeted email lists come in.

Building a targeted list is the process of narrowing down a larger lead list into a highly refined set of ideal customers, the people who your sales team stands a chance of converting.

The bottom line is?

An accurate list ensures you’re not wasting resources and slowing down pipeline efficiency.

Factors to consider when segmenting marketing lists

You can use virtually infinite data points to create targeted consumer lists.

If you want, you could create a segmented list of companies with 50-55 employees who have branches in Raleigh, North Carolina, currently use Notion, and have a Sales Manager named Mark.

So, the question isn’t really about how you can segment lists but more about how you should do it.

There are five main categories that you can use to create segmented lists. Here, we explore them in order of importance. 👇

Segmenting by intent and behaviour

The best data point to use for creating targeted mailing lists that deliver results is buyer intent.

Buyer intent data comes from a number of sources, from how a prospect has engaged with your website to browsing behaviour on social media.

This kind of data gives you insight into:

• What your potential customers are interested in.
• What problems they might be facing.
• What solutions they’re currently investigating.

If you want to send targeted emails that are as personalised as possible while still retaining the economies of scale that come with sending emails to segmented lists, then intent and behavioural data are where you want to focus.

Segmenting by solution

Segmenting target audiences by solution is a useful option for companies that sell more than one product or that have a product that covers several different use cases.

Mailchimp, for example, has an email marketing platform, a website builder, and content creation tools.

The people who are interested in each are very different audiences. If Mailchimp wants to convert a prospect who wants to build a website, sending emails related to its email marketing solution won’t do the job.

By segmenting by solution, you can speak more pointedly to individual buyer needs and challenges.

Segmenting by psychographics

When you segment lists using psychographics, you’re targeting prospects based on shared interests, values, and beliefs.

Common examples include hobbies, religious affiliation, political opinions, and personality traits.

Psychographics may not be a suitable segmenting tool for everyone. Some of the information just isn’t relevant to why someone would buy aSaaS product. 

However, personality traits can be useful for SDRs to determine how to form a relationship with someone. In addition, data on someone’s personality may inform the tone of the email or how you leverage humour in email marketing strategies.

But consider a nutritional supplement brand like Athletic Greens.

For some buyers, the motivation to purchase their headline product, AG1, might be purely based on personal health.

For others, the choice to shun big pharma products in favour of a plant-based solution might be the core driver. Still, status and affiliation may be drivers. Many famous podcasters and fitness celebrities consume and support the product.

If it’s relevant to your product or service, psychographic segmentation can be an effective way to connect with buyer motivators.

Segmenting by demographics

Demographics cover B2B data points like a person or company’s age, income, headcount, job title, and so on.

While it’s less targeted than other data points discussed here, it can still be useful for ensuring your messaging is relevant.

For example, how HubSpot speaks to its small business owners with less than three users is likely to be (and should be) vastly different from how it communicates with enterprise organisations with thousands of employees.

Segmenting by geographic location

Finally, we’ve got geographic location. That is, targeting your communication based on where a prospect is.

This can be useful for time-sensitive communications, such as running a promotion off the back of a local sporting event.

It’s also important if you’re scheduling targeted email sends to go out at a specific time. The point of this endeavour is not that the email is sent at 9 am (for example) but that it gets delivered at that time.

That means, for instance, that your email sends will need to be scheduled differently for East Coast prospects than for those over on the West Coast.

4 inside tips for creating target marketing lists

Here, we share four inside tips to create better-targeted prospect lists.

1. Use double opt-in to help weed out apathy

Inbound marketing is a powerful way to gather warm leads.

The thing is, not all warm leads are equally warm.

There are many reasons why someone might download that eBook you use to capture leads.

One prospect might have a valid use case and a high level of interest in your product. A second might be slightly interested but not ready to buy. Another might simply be a competitor doing some recon on your content assets or a fellow content marketer searching for stats to add to their latest blog posts.

One effective method for weeding out the “just looking” from your target audience is to employ a double opt-in mechanism.

Here, the prospect provides consent (opts in) for email communications when they sign up for whatever piece of content you’re using as a lead gen asset. Then, you automatically send them an initial email asking them to confirm again that they want to receive communications.

Of course, you can still send email comms to anyone who doesn’t opt in a second time since you have consent.

But running a double opt-in helps you validate emails and build a list of high-quality leads — those that actually go into their email inbox and confirm they want to hear from you are obviously interested!

2. Leverage tags to easily segment existing lists

One of the tricky parts about building a marketing list is that as it grows, your audience becomes more diverse, with different interests, needs, demographics, and use cases.

Sending the same thing to everyone on your list isn’t exactly “targeted.”

What you want to do here is use segmentation to deliver more targeted, personalised messaging.

You might, for instance, filter your list into enterprise, mid-market, and small business segments, crafting and distributing marketing content with messaging that is appropriate for each sub-audience.

As you continue importing prospect data to your CRM, sales engagement platform, or email marketing software, add as many relevant tags as possible to assist future segmentation.

A tag is an attribute that the account or prospect has, such as the industry the company works in, its annual income, or employee headcount.

Add as much data as you have available at the moment you import data.

You may not know how you’ll use a given tag right now, but you’ll be grateful in the future when you want to send targeted emails to, say, all VPs of Marketing in companies with more than 30 people on their team.

3. Open up more segmenting possibilities with data enrichment

Your ability to segment and effectively create targeted lists is highly dependent on the data you have on hand.

More data points = more ways to segment = more opportunities to create personalised, relevant messaging.

Data enrichment solutions are the perfect partner here, helping you expand the data you have within an existing list.

Here, you integrate the data enrichment solution with your existing database (your CRM, for instance). Then, it will automatically import and sync additional data points, filling in the gaps — missing phone numbers, for example — and enriching with data points you might not have at all, such as parent company structures.

4. Be aware that not all list providers cover all territories

While we’re talking about data providers, a quick but important note:

Not all solutions cover the same ground.

The majority of data providers you’ll come across service the US and do so pretty well. However, most of them have fairly basic coverage of European countries.

If you’re going after territories in the EU and UK, you’ll want to select a data provider that specialises in European data coverage.

How Cognism’s AI Search aids marketing list creation

As one of the leading providers of international B2B data, we know that access to quality data drives effective sales and marketing strategies.

But having data isn’t the same as being able to access it when and how you need it.

That’s why we built AI Search, a powerful search experience that makes it easier to find the data you need when you need it so you can build targeted marketing lists faster.

With AI Search, you can identify potential customers 74% faster, so you can create a list and get back to the activities that move the revenue needle forward.

The beauty of Cognism’s AI Search is that it doesn’t require a direct match against whatever you’re searching for.

With traditional search tools, if you’re looking for Sarah Anderson at Acme Inc., you’d have to type in something that matches, such as “Sarah” or “Acme.”

With AI Search, you can type something like, “Show me Heads of Marketing in financial companies” and we’ll surface the people you’re after.

Plus we have voice search with multilingual support, so you can scour Cognism’s database quicker than ever in your native tongue!

Filtering huge databases into segmented lists becomes much quicker with AI Search.

Instead of having to click and add multiple filters for company size, geographic location, and annual revenue, you can just say to AI Search:

“All companies in San Fransisco that have over $5m in annual revenue, headcount 150+.”

Cognism’s AI Search helps marketers solidify their TAM when entering new markets, quickly build targeted lists and stay agile against competitors.

Watch the video below to see how it works 👇

Build more effective targeted marketing lists faster

Segmenting a large database into highly targeted marketing lists is the key to delivering targeted campaigns to a relevant audience.

To segment effectively, you need access to timely, accurate company and person-level data covering the regions you’re selling into.

Cognism helps over 3,000 revenue teams at companies like Drift and Aircall access up-to-date sales intelligence to build more targeted marketing email lead lists faster.

Sign up for a demo today and see how our huge B2B data set, coupled with our lightning-fast AI Search, can help you stay competitive and design high-converting marketing lists quickly.