Respondent tagging: a much better way to segment and qualify
Scott Brinker on Tuesday, June 5, 2007 at 10:39AM We’ve been advocating respondent segmentation in post-click marketing for a while now, in particular early segmentation, before a respondent converts. The motivation is to fill the gap in the funnel: somewhere between winning that first click from 100% of your respondents and actually converting a tiny fraction of them (~3% industry average), there’s a mysterious pre-conversion void, where the far majority of respondents simply vanish without a word. The question is always: why?
Directed behavioral segmentation dispels this void by inducing respondents to click through simple choices on the first page or two of a landing path. To the respondent, these choices are presented as shortcuts, to quickly direct them to the content that’s most relevant to their particular interests. (Example: I click on a Caribbean resort ad, and the first page of the landing path asks me to choose romantic rendezvous or bring-the-kids family vacation.) To the marketing manager running the campaign, aside from targeting the right content to the right respondents (which naturally improves the conversion rate), the tracking of these segmentation choices reveals who’s responding to which ads — even if they don’t convert. This helps explain why certain people are or are not converting. Then, instead of trying to globally optimize a marketing campaign for all audiences — which inevitably devolves into generic, middle-of-the-road tactics — you can maximize for each audience segment independently, vividly, passionately.
Although this technique has proven quite effective, a downside has been that it implied marketing managers had to define a hierarchy of segments and subsegments first and then build paths within that structure. It is certainly a very good idea to think about segmentation at the start of a campaign, but the long tail of web marketing is fluid, and it’s often advantageous to let your ideas of segments and subsegments evolve through quick and easy experiments “in the wild”. Think about segments, but don’t overthink them — the post-click marketing ecosystem of create, test, analyze, adjust is better served by cycle speed than lengthy deliberation.
Inspired by the tagging paradigm popularized by Web 2.0 sites such as flickr, del.icio.us, and other social media — where users “tag” content with their own keywords, and collectively everyone’s tags are aggregated into an emergent “folksonomy” instead of a rigid, top-down taxonomy — we’ve adopted that idea for respondent tagging. It reverses the flow: instead of users tagging content, content tags users (or, more accurately, users’ content choices cause them to be tagged).
>Rather than laboring too hard over a segmentation hierarchy, a marketing manager simply tags a respondent with a keyword at any point in their post-click marketing experience. Click on a choice on the landing page? Tag it — it’s analogous to assigning a segment. Submit a form with a particular answer to a question? Tag it too, a way to mark respondents with different qualifiers.
It’s the same underlying principle we’ve been championing — segmenting and qualifying respondents is essential to good post-click marketing — but tagging is just plain easier than getting caught up in hierarchical segmentation. You can change tags or add new ones in a matter of seconds. The order in which respondents are tagged — a segment vs. a subsegment — can be switched around effortlessly, without losing the fidelity of the information. And you can layer your own meta-data on top as you see fit, facilitating better hand-offs to subsequent systems and later stages in your sales and marketing funnel.
The beauty of a tagging approach is that you learn about the emergent structure of your respondent universe, more rapidly, with less allegiance to pre-conceived notions of your audience — notions that just as often hold you back from discovering the real drivers in your customer base.
Tagging does have its critics, primarily in a social media context. The concern there is that the lack of coordination among participants inventing tags can generate meta noise and idiosyncrasies. However, respondent tagging in the other direction has three countervailing forces to impose just the right amount of order:
- As a manager, you can enforce as few or as many rules of tagging — how tags are created and used — as you want. Different organizations can choose to make this process as tightly coordinated or as loosely distributed as they see fit, whichever best serves the needs of their market. Even within a firm, this might differ from campaign to campaign, some more structured, some more experimental.
- Unlike social media, where a tag is often merely a classifier, the context of when and how a respondent is assigned a tag during post-click marketing is rich with added meaning. A respondent’s walk through a path has direction and order — first choice on a page, second choice on a page, choices before conversion, choices after conversion, etc. Tags at these different points can have different significance, which can help identify the pivotal tags in a campaign’s success.
- The correlation of tags with conversion rate and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) metrics provides another dimension by which to rank the relative significance of tags, which may vary across different paths, traffic sources, or even overall campaigns.
We believe this gives you the benefits of a tagging methodology, while exercising enough managerial control — as much as you decide valuable in the balance of flexibility and consistency — to run a dynamic, vibrant, and stable platform for post-click marketing analysis.
Test, test, test. And now tag, tag, tag.
Reader Comments (5)
What a great idea! Can you provide examples of anyone who has had success with this method?
Hi, Shane. We've worked with a number of clients who have seen 2X or greater gains in their conversion rates by using directed behavioral segmentation on landing paths. Citrix is one with a published case study (http://www.ioninteractive.com/English/casestudy.asp?contentID=15) to dig into some of the details.
As for tagging, this is a new twist for us, but the underlying principle is the same -- segmenting and qualifying respondents based on low-hurdle choices. With tagging, however, we believe it will be much easier for managers of these landing paths to create them and test variations without getting hung up too much on a formal hierarchy.
We've been really happy with tests on our own paths, but the proof is definitely in how effective other people find it to be. As our clients start adopting our new software this week, evolving from formal segmentation to tags, we'll report back on their experiences.
We're also happy to hear about other people who implement these techniques in their own software or other third-party packages.
I have been amazed by, and have been following the ideals of this blog for a while now. Post-Click marketing is such a highly underutilized concept in affiliate marketing.
I wish that the technology you passionately speak about and develop would be made available to 'small time' individuals such as myself.
Thanks, Stephan! Although the software we've been developing is relatively high-end, we believe that a lot of the core ideas behind good post-click marketing can also be applied in smaller scale implementations. It may require a little more manual labor, but if you can experiment with path-based landing experiences that branch on audience segmentation choices, you're jumping straight to core of our favorite post-click marketing technique. And, who knows? Businesses grow and software evolves, so perhaps we'll find a way to work together at some point. Always great to share the same passion with someone about the future of marketing on the web!
Scott..
Look at you now!! Very impressive!