Author: Franz Malten Buemann

 

 

Negative Target Group is one of the less known marketing tools. Used well, it can be extremely effective. It helps you create better content, better target your ads, let those marketing dollars stretch further, and ultimately results in increased ROI. Keep reading to learn how to find negative buyer personas and what you can learn from them?

 

McKinsey study shows that ads tailored to clients’ needs can significantly increase ROI – up to 8 times, and lift sales of at least 10%. Businesses make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on Google Ads. This is a very good starting point for considering whether you are spending your marketing dollars well. If your ROI is below that two dollars, then you have a lot of room for optimizing your spending. There are many ways to do this, but the key here is to get your targeting right and identify your target audience.

 

The first step is certainly to determine the buyer persona. Once this is established, you create target groups to which you target particular campaigns and advertising creations. However, sometimes it happens that despite establishing a target group, you generate a lot of traffic but it does not translate into conversions. This could mean that the group you have chosen includes people who only seem to fit into it. You can use them as a basis for creating a negative buyer persona.

 

What is a negative target group?

 

Negative target group, negative target market, negative target persona – these are all terms for people and groups of people who, for various reasons, you don’t want to target with your message because they are not the recipients of what you offer. These are the people who will come to your event, enjoy the free samples, but won’t leave any valuable data nor become customers in the future. These are the people who will buy your product and then leave a negative online review because it doesn’t fit their needs, even though it seemed like a good fit when they saw the ad and purchased it. These are the people who will be the most problematic customers because their expectations will not match the promise you give along with the product.

 

Why is it important to spot a negative target market?

 

One would think that a negative buyer persona is someone you would want to avoid like the plague. In a sense, this is true. However, to effectively exclude them when targeting your marketing message, it’s good to know who they are in the first place. Since it could be that the negative buyer persona of product A is your ideal buyer persona of product B, it’s very possible that they are in your database. And they are absolutely not personae non gratae that you absolutely do not want in your database. They’re simply customers who will only buy a certain product group and have no interest in the others. Therefore, determining the negative target group for your service or product will allow you to use exclusions wisely in individual campaigns, and to tailor conditional and dynamic content accordingly in personalized email and website communication.

 

How do you find a negative buyer persona?

 

There are various methods of extracting negative buyer persona that are coming up at different stages of building a marketing strategy. Today, I will focus on how to find and tag them on the Customer Data Platform (CDP). In your negative target group you can include:

 

individuals who visited a website or specific URL by accident, such as clicking unintentionally on a Facebook ad. These are people who disappeared from the website without any interaction after visiting it once.
persons who are 90% interested in products from category X (read about them, visit URLs of selected categories, buy specific products), but make a single purchase from category Y (e.g. as a gift).
people who were interested in a product a long time ago, but bought it once, or did not buy it at all.
people who have relocated, so some of the location-based offers no longer apply to them and may even be annoying.
those whose needs have changed with age (or with the age of their children).
individuals who are interested in the subject matter, but not interested in the products (e.g. football fans reading news about their favorite team’s rivals). This would be, for example, a group that goes to a blog and reads content but never enters a store, or a person who has gone through a Lead Nurturing cycle for a specific interest category but has not done any micro conversions.
a group that meets the target audience but has not shown any purchase activity, subscribes to newsletters but never clicks on them, or does not respond to emails with promotions.

 

What data to look for when creating a negative target group?

 

To create a negative buyer persona, you can use a range of information. The choice of data will largely depend on what insights you have, what type of eCommerce you are running, and what the main assumptions are about this anti-persona. It’s certainly worth paying attention to:

 

transactional data,
subscription activity,
website activity,
mobile application activity,
demographic data (age, location),
declarative data,
interest-related segments and activity within them,
predictive data.

 

Putting them together properly in SALESmanago’s Hyper Segmentation Center will give you the desired result of ready-made segments of people to whom you don’t want to sell certain products or services.

 

How to use a negative buyer persona?

 

Once you have neatly tagged negative target groups for specific products, product categories or services, you can start using them to improve your marketing communications.

 

Area #1 PPC

 

The first thing that pops to mind, is naturally excluding these people from PPC campaigns. This is an area where your spend optimization is quickest to spot and most visible. Excluding negative buyer personas from individual campaigns will allow you to wisely control conversion rates, as well as increase customer satisfaction with purchased products and services. However, that’s not all. After all, marketing doesn’t end with Google and Facebook. Other marketing channels will also greatly benefit from isolating the negative target market.

 

Area #2 Email & Website

 

When creating email campaigns, you can focus on tailoring the message to the best buyer personas, and when selecting the group of addressees, exclude those who are in the negative target group. Such an approach will have a positive impact on your mailing statistics. It will reach only those who are interested in the product itself. This will translate into increase in such indicators as open rate (OR), click-through rate (CTR), as well as conversions supported in this channel. What’s more, better targeting of email campaigns will also benefit your reputation. Fewer messages will be ignored and marked as spam.

 

This doesn’t mean you have to suddenly create hundreds of campaigns just to target each person individually. CDP gives you the opportunity to hyper-personalize your content. What this means in practice is that each of your audience can get a message tailored 1:1 to their needs and interests.

 

You can also use the negative buyer persona by creating messages with conditional content. In this scenario you prepare one creation to which you can add dynamically changing elements. They will be different for different people receiving the email. It works similarly with the content on a web page. Conditional and dynamic content changes the landscape of your site so that visitors only see what interests them.

 

You can also highlight features disliked by the negative buyer persona in different content to keep those people from buying a product that doesn’t satisfy them.

 

Area #3 Product Development

 

Another application of negative buyer persona is in the area related to Product Development. Analyzing your negative target audience, including their habits, behaviors, and transactions, allows you to find areas of your product that, while seemingly attractive, may seem difficult to some buyers. If you want your product to be more versatile, you can focus on developing the discovered areas to tailor it or creating an alternate version of it for this group as well. Doing so will allow you to increase your audience pool and create an even better product. You can also look at it from another angle: the things that idealized buyer personas love and negative buyer personas hate are also clues on the direction of developing a product that will sell even better to the chosen group.

 

Should you remove negative buyer persona from your contact database?

 

Definitely not! Negative buyer personas are often people who are welcomed in other segments of your audience. Knowledge of their existence should rather be used for even better personalization of the messages sent. Dynamic content and A/B/X testing will help with this.

 

Before you start tidying up your database, ask yourself what else you can do to improve the experience of these groups.Focus on wisely excluding segments from your audience rather than removing them without a second thought.

 

However, if your efforts have no positive effect, consider cleaning up your CDP. If you have people there who have not shown activity in a particular channel for more than 1 year, it’s worth considering whether you want to continue burning through your budget on ads and text messages to them and ruining your reputation in the email channel.

 

Negative target group – a few words at the end

 

All the contacts in your database are important. Some of them convert, buy and build a long-term relationship with your brand. The rest provides you with valuable information, helps you learn from your mistakes and improve your product or service.

 

Negative buyer persona is a source of a lot of data that tells you what not to do. If you don’t want to burn through your marketing money and you have the tools and the willingness to learn, you’ll find them another fantastic way to optimize your spend and get more return on your investment at the same time.

 

Targeting products to the right customers will also make you build stronger relationships with them. It will further increase the likelihood that over time, your buying and paying customers will become brand advocates and your personal influencers.

 

Are you interested in giving negative target groups a try? Talk to your account manager at SALESmanago and together you can create negative buyer personas for your eCommerce.

Spam — to know it is to hate it. Ever since the first unsolicited advertisement was sent by telegraph in 1864, consumers have been contending with what we now call spam, and the mass adoption of email has only made it easier for scammers and legitimate businesses alike to stuff our spam folders with ads…
The post Why Your Emails Are Going to Spam and Ways You Can Put a Stop to It appeared first on Benchmark Email.

The Top 8 Best Email Marketing toolsof 2021:
Getresponse: Powerful, simplified tool to send emails, create pages, and automate your marketing.
Mailgun： Powerful APIs that enable you to send ,receive and track email effortlessly. AWeber: Build a stronger connection with your audience. Mad Mimi: Simple Lovely Email
Mailerlite: Take email marketing beyond the inbox with advanced tools made easy.
Sendgrid: Partner with the email service trusted by developers and marketers.
Campaign: A platform connects people, communities, and funders.
Mailchimp: Ring your audience data, marketing channels, and insights together. Wanna learn more information about this? You may visit this website.

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If your marketing team and the systems you have in place to attract leads are working properly, you’re likely seeing anywhere from 10s to 1,000s of new leads each week. If you’ve got a robust sales team, they may be able to contact every single lead within a few hours.

However, if you’re like most companies, your sales team has to prioritize in order to reach out to the “best” prospects quickly, while saving the “less likely” prospects for last. This doesn’t mean that they can’t be converted, there’s just a lower chance of securing those prospects as customers.

Time spent courting the wrong prospect is not only an exercise in futility, but it takes time away from your salespeople and prevents them from closing sales and making your company money. How then, do you make the job easier (and more lucrative) for your salespeople?
Predictive Lead Scoring can take the guesswork out of following up on leads. Let’s take a look at what it is and how it could help your business grow.
What is predictive lead scoring?
Before we define predictive lead scoring, it’s important to understand traditional lead scoring and its limitations.
Businesses have struggled with prioritizing lead follow-up for decades. In many cases, salespeople are left to their own devices, using their best judgment to decide who gets contacted first. Marketers and salespeople use data such as demographic info (age, marital status, industry, role), to rank potential customers as to how likely they are to buy. Those who rank high on this scale are contacted first, while others are contacted last, or if time doesn’t permit, not contacted at all.
The problem with this subjective process is that it’s … subjective. Salespeople are forced to rely on “gut feelings” and factor in their own historical experience to make this decision. Neither of these proves to be consistently accurate causing quality leads to slip through the cracks as they chase prospects unlikely to buy.
Predictive lead scoring is machine learning that takes this theory one step further by using predictive modeling algorithms to analyze data from past customers and current prospects to predict future outcomes. Put another way, predictive lead scoring has the ability to create an “ideal customer” profile based on past buying behavior, and then identify which current prospects best fit that profile. It removes the possibility for human error or bias and instead relies on hard data to make its predictions.
The Benefits of Predictive Lead Scoring
If your marketing and sales teams have been struggling with identifying top leads and are unable to follow up with everyone that enters your database, predictive lead scoring may be exactly what your company needs. With a multitude of benefits, it’s like hiring another department to assist in new customer acquisition.
The benefits of predictive lead scoring include:
1. Create Harmony Between Marketing and Sales
When there are so many leads coming in but not many sales being closed, these two departments may turn on one another. The marketing department doesn’t understand how they’re providing a large number of leads that Sales can’t close. And the sales department believes that quantity is more important than quality, and they aren’t getting any good leads.
Incorporating predictive lead scoring will help these two departments work together and produce more.
2. Save Time
An automated lead scoring system means that your marketing and sales teams no longer have to waste time vetting potential customers. Their time can be better spent bringing in more leads and following up on the right ones.
3. Remove Human Error
No matter how good (and quick) your employees are at reviewing potential customers, there will always be an inherent bias. People can’t approach a situation without drawing on memories of the past. No matter how objective they attempt to be, this bias will creep into every decision they make. Using a computer algorithm to make these decisions removes the possibility of human error or judgment.
4. Lightning-Fast Results
While it takes a little bit of time to set up, once predictive lead scoring is up and running, you’ll receive results considerably faster than you would if a person were doing the work. You receive high-quality, data-driven leads before a human employee could even get their coffee.
5. See Continual Improvement
As you close and service more customers, you’ll collect more data. The more data you have, the better predictive lead scoring works and the more data points you’ll have to work with.
Predictive lead scoring is ready to work for you and make your marketing and sales teams more efficient.
How to Incorporate Predictive Lead Scoring in Your Business
Now that you understand predictive lead scoring and how it can revolutionize your business, how do you get started?
HubSpot offers Predictive Lead Scoring software that integrates with your Enterprise CRM, providing machine learning that reviews thousands of data points across your contact base to identify your best leads.
These data points are drawn from analytics (website and email behavior), firmographic information about the contact’s company and their relationship within HubSpot, and interactions that have been logged in the CRM.
To use this feature:

Click the Settings icon in the main navigation bar of your HubSpot account.
From the left sidebar menu, navigate to CRM > Properties.
Search in the Contact Information property group for Likelihood to close and Contact priority.

Likelihood to close is a score that represents the probability of a contact closing as a customer within the next 90 days. It used standard contact properties and behavior to predict this. If the score or probability value is 22, that means there is a 22% chance of closing as a customer in the next 90 days.
Contact priority uses the Likelihood to close score to filter segments of your best and worst leads.
As you accumulate more data, the system will improve itself, providing even better predictions and guiding you towards the most important leads. Because the program requires data to do its job, you will not begin seeing values for Contact priority until you have reached 100 contacts.
If you want to see your organization grow and your team members flourish, predictive lead scoring is essential. Imagine what your business will look like in five, 10, or 15 years when the system you use to attract and acquire new customers is fully optimized.
Give your marketing and sales teams a leg up on the competition and try predictive lead scoring today.

It’s late and you’re working on a project that’s due soon.
You feel overwhelmed by your tasks and aren’t quite sure how you got here. You make a self-promise to resolve this issue but you don’t know how, so the cycle continues.
Consider this your WebMD diagnosis: You’re likely struggling with bad time management.

The good news is, time management is a learned skill. By following the tips below, written with cross-functional teams in mind, you can be on your way to getting back control of your time and working efficiently.
What can time management skills help a person do?
Time management is necessary for a successful personal and professional life.
When you manage your time well, you can be more productive and efficient. You have a solid understanding of what each task requires and you can plan accordingly.
It allows you to maximize your time and perform better.
Managing your time well also helps you produce high-quality work. When we struggle with this skill, we often rush to complete our tasks and can easily feel overwhelmed.
1. Learn your pattern of productivity.
Everyone has a different productivity pattern.
We’ve long separated people into two categories: Morning people and night people. However, there are many more facets to productivity.
Perhaps you’re more efficient during short sprints of focus, following the Pomodoro technique. Or you might prefer knocking out your top priorities in one stretch.
Find out what makes you most productive and use that to your advantage. If you notice you’re most productive in the early morning, use that time to cross your focus-heavy, high-priority tasks off your to-do list.
Building your work schedule around your natural patterns will make it easier for you to focus and be more efficient in your workflow.
2. Prioritize your tasks.
Name a better feeling than crossing something off a to-do list.
There’s something about completing a task that fills you with a sense of accomplishment and builds momentum.
My colleague and marketing manager for Channel Promotions at HubSpot, Jennifer Kim, calls written to-do lists her holy grail.
“At the beginning of each day, I like to take the time to manually write out what tasks I need to complete for the day,” she says. “It’s key for me to write out tasks manually versus typing them out because I’m able to get a better sense of what tasks will take the most time and what I need to prioritize as well as mentally get myself in the headspace to take each one on.”
She then cross-references this list with her Google Calendar to plan out her day.
Now that you have every task written out, how do you decide what to tackle first? Meg Prater, senior manager of the Marketing, Sales, and Service blogs at HubSpot, has some advice.
“I prioritize based on impact to the business. Is there a planning meeting with our VP? The prep work for that should probably come first in my week when I’m freshest,” she says. “When I prioritize based on impact, I end the day knowing that I handled the tasks that were most valuable to the business and our goals – it’s my North Star.”
Ranking your tasks ensures that you tackle the most important work first and can keep you from feeling overwhelmed.
3. Track your activities.
One issue many people face when managing their time is correctly assessing how long a task will take to complete.
It can be hard to stick to a schedule if you over- or underestimated certain tasks. The task that was supposed to take 30 minutes took two hours and that can throw off your entire day.
To avoid this slippery slope, take a week to track your activities.
Write down your most common tasks. For example, as a writer, my tasks include research, media creation, and sourcing, writing, editing, uploading. I also have administrative tasks to complete throughout the week.
Use a time tracking app like Toggl or Clockify to figure out how you are spending your time.
“Timing myself helps me to concretely see where I’m spending my time. Where are the time sucks? Am I giving myself enough time to recharge between tasks?” says Prater. “This allows me to be more efficient with my time allocation, and set time boundaries for tasks I’m spending too much time on.”
Once you know exactly what each task requires, you can make an accurate schedule and make adjustments to create a more efficient process.
4. Make collaborating easier.
If you work on a cross-functional team or project, it’s vital that you set up tools that will make it easier for you to work together.
Senior Audience Growth Manager at HubSpot Pamela Bump, who often works with several teams, has a few recommendations.
“If you’re in a role where you must do projects for different teams, like creating ad campaigns or email promotions, set up a form that cross-functional colleagues can fill out so your requests will all go to one place and can be reviewed at the same time.”
Consolidating your requests to one place makes it easier to review and ensures nothing gets lost somewhere.
Bump adds that you should notify your cross-functional teams once you’ve launched the form and how you would like them to use it. You can inform them via email, Slack, or even an internal blog post that can be easily bookmarked or referenced.
5. Take regular breaks.
You’ve created your schedule for the day. You’ve been working since 8 a.m., it’s now 1 p.m. and you can’t seem to focus.
Next thing you know, it’s one hour later and nothing has been accomplished.
Sometimes, we try to push through slumps when all we need is a break to decompress and get re-energized.
Whether it’s taking a walk, watching an hour of TV, or catching up with a colleague, it’s important to take some time away from your work.
6. Be flexible.
Not every day will work out exactly as planned, and that’s OK.
Managing your time efficiently also means leaving some room for the unplanned. Perhaps, you planned on working on task A and that’s not panning out.
If that’s the case, don’t be afraid to swap it out with another task. As long as you keep the momentum going, you can still be successful.
When Bump hits a roadblock in a task, she pivots.
“I look at my to-do list and see if there are any super-quick items I can tackle before getting started on the bigger item,” she says. “For example, if I pause to return an email or quickly schedule a piece of content to go live, I feel energized by knocking something off my to-do list and will be more motivated to work on the bigger task.”
Having structure is important, but leave room for tasks to move around.
7. Protect your time.
Protecting your time is one of the most important ways to manage your time well. It can look like saying no, delegating, and deprioritizing a task.
Saying “no” at work always feels like a risk, like it’s sending a signal that you’re not a team player. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Not every ask that comes your way is a fire that needs immediate extinguishing. Many things in our professional lives can wait,” Prater says. “Prioritizing those asks as they come in, saying ‘no’ when an ask isn’t in scope, and realizing when something is OK to wait until tomorrow to work on has been key for me.”
Prater adds that learning to delegate has been huge for her growth.
“I used to feel like I needed to control as much as possible in my sphere – to prove myself, or some nonsense like that,” she says. “Now, I trust the folks around me and view delegation as an opportunity for someone else to grow and develop. It frees up more of my time and has energized folks on my team with new skills.”
Don’t be afraid to redirect your colleagues when your plate is already full and lean on your colleagues for help.
8. Use project management software.
Are you bad at managing your time or do you just not have the right tools to support your workflow?
With project management software like Asana, Jira, and Monday.com, you can streamline your workflow and make cross-team collaboration that much easier.
It can also be a valuable resource when you feel overwhelmed by your tasks.
“Asana has been a huge help in organizing out my tasks. My team has an ongoing sprint board where we write out our top 3-4 priorities for the week,” Kim says. “In the case that if I ever find myself overwhelmed with all that’s going on, I can fall back to that sprint board and center myself on where I need to spend my time.”
The great thing about these tools is that they work well for individual and group projects.
9. Establish a routine and stick to it.
Imagine taking a different route to work every day. It would be hard to be consistent about when you’d arrive at work. I also imagine this constant change would create some unease and stress.
Humans are creatures of habits and we crave consistency. At work, having a routine helps you maintain productivity.
Whether you’re going to the office every day or working from home, set a routine for your day. Be consistent about the time you wake up and your pre-work tasks.
This process will help you get in the headspace to work once you’re finally at your desk. If you find that your current routine has some kinks in it, try something different.
10. Lean on your team.
While you decide how you manage your time, you can also get support from your team.
“I really lean on my manager to talk through situations when I do feel that there’s a lot going on,” says Kim. “It really helps to have her bigger picture perspective on what projects are most in line with my team’s goals. We’re also able to talk through whether there are areas that we can support each other’s load.”
Your manager can help you prioritize your tasks in alignment with your team’s broader goals. They can also help you protect your time when it comes to cross-functional projects.
Bump encourages honesty with your colleagues and your manager about your bandwidth.
“When working with cross-functional teams, it can be easy to agree to too many tasks and not have time to complete them all,” she says. “If you foresee a time crunch, reach out to your colleagues or manager and see what can be moved or adjusted if needed due to your changing priorities.”
The work doesn’t get done alone. So, make sure you’re leaning on your team to help you manage your time and achieve your goals.
11. Stack your meetings.
Ever have meetings spread out throughout the day? Doing work in between those can seem impossible.
It can feel like just when you’re getting in your groove, you have to stop to jump into another meeting.
“I find that when my meetings are scattered throughout the day without any significant chunks of free time I can devote to my own tasks, I’m unable to focus and do what I need to do,” says Kim.”
One way to prevent this is by stacking your meetings back-to-back, whenever possible. Have multiple one-on-ones this week? Try to knock them all out on the same day in a block of time.
Kim says this tactic helps her get into focus mode.
“I’m able to do my best work when I can get into the right headspace – whether that’s meeting mode or working mode – so this has been really effective for me.”
Bump suggests scheduling plan-oriented meetings on specific days of the week.
“This will leave you some wide-open time at the end of the week for larger projects like creating content or brainstorming new strategies,” she says.
12. Limit distractions.
You’re trying to get work done but your email inbox is pilling up and you keep getting pinged.
Distractions like these make it impossible to focus on your tasks and manage your time well. Thankfully, many of these communication platforms offer features to limit your distractions.
For instance, productivity software Boomerang offers a “pause inbox” feature that temporarily stops new emails from populating in your Gmail or Outlook account.
You can also use the “do not disturb” feature on your messaging software to prevent notifications.
You can also put a status like “Heads down – slow to respond” to let your colleagues know you may be unavailable for the next few hours.
13. Declutter your space.
Your space is a reflection of your mind.
If your space is messy, it can make it harder to focus and manage your time effectively. It can also contribute to feelings of being overwhelmed.
With this in mind, make sure your work environment reflects the state you want to be in. Remove non-essentials from your desk, add affirmations like “You can do it!” and “Breathe” to motivate you throughout the day.
You can even add essential oils to create a calming environment and play some soothing music in the background.
14. Take accountability.
You may be responsible for keeping track of your progress toward achieving your goal, and holding yourself accountable to the timelines and benchmarks you’ve established will help you stay motivated and positive at work.
Personal accountability leads to increased feelings of workplace satisfaction, creativity, and innovation, and there are a few ways to promote that while working on your long-term project, including:

Sharing progress toward goals with others
Setting up a personal reward system for each benchmark you achieve on the path to project completion.
Tracking your progress so you can visualize what portion of your project you’ve successfully completed.

15. Review past performance.
Analyze and report on successes and challenges of projects for future goal-setting.
Once you’ve successfully completed a long-term project, don’t move on to the next one without first reflecting on your strategies for project management. What went well, and perhaps more importantly, what didn’t?
If your work is primarily comprised of long-term projects, you will need to continually refine and improve your approach to be as efficient as possible.
Document your processes and share them with your team so they can learn from your triumphs and struggles for their projects as well.
Managing your time is a learned skill that requires a lot of discipline and flexibility. It’s also something that requires support from your team, as those interactions impact your ability to complete your tasks.
While you may be an expert time manager tomorrow, following these tips will definitely help you improve your current process.