Between our newsletters, webcasts, white papers, and Decisions promotions, we send out lots of emails. We try to be very careful about finding a balance between reaching the broadest audience and not sending irrelevant messages to our readers.
So we’ve made extra efforts in the last couple months to make sure that only the most accurate audiences get the right content. That means we have more carefully segmented our email communications by industry, business need, and geography, as well as things like Dynamics role and product interests. And something very interesting has happened – we just had our best lead generation month ever for our clients while also narrowing down our targeted mailings to the most accurate segments possible.
In other words – fewer recipients per marketing communication and better results. This tells us that targeting is working for us and for our ISV clients.
We have the ability to segment our reader-base by many different demographics; Dynamics Product, Role (User, VAR, etc.), Location, Business Need (BI, Document Management, etc.), and Industry, to name a few. This not only helps us deliver the right content to our readers, but for ISVs, it allows us to deliver content to their target prospects.
Now, you might be thinking, if my white paper is sent out to all MSDynamicsWorld.com readers, wouldn’t the right people see it anyway? Well, they probably would, but many of the wrong people would download it as well, which would create more work for you and your sales team, because you’d spend time trying to qualify those wrong people.
And as a publisher, we depend on the trust of our readers every time we communicate with them. Sending out an irrelevant message to a group of readers today might generate some extra clicks and downloads in the short term, but it hurts our ability to have an impact on behalf of our clients next time around, when that message might be perfectly relevant.
So improved targeting and better lead performance numbers have been an important reminder to us: there is no shortcut for putting in a little more work to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.
