One Metric That You MUST Know About Your Customers

Personalizing marketing content for different consumer segments is slowly becoming a mainstream rather than a “luxury” that only big companies could afford just a few years ago. However, what if… you’re small or medium size business with limited resources and you simply don’t know where to start. What if you would like to find your very own 80x20  “customer experience personalization rule” where you would do only 20 percent of work to collect 80 percent of the revenue? The answer is very simple – the only metric that you should really care about is the gender of your consumers. Knowing the gender of leads and consumers is oftentimes overlooked. This can be used for personalization and re-targeting efforts used for email, paid search, SEO and other channels. Studies show that gender marketing personalization can increase conversion rates by over 40 percent, open rates by 25%, re-targeting rates by over 30%.

You might be wondering how to get consumer’s gender if you never collected this information. The answer is very simple – you don’t need to collect consumer’s gender to know the gender. All you need is to have the first name and work with vendor like NameGenderPro.com that connected over 170k of unique names to gender. NameGenderPro is the largest database all first names by gender scrapped from reputable publically available governmental sources such as US Census, UK Census, Canada Census as well as social media. In order to start your own gender marketing segmentation (and personalizing your consumer’s experience) all you need is to access NameGenderPro list, match it against all first names that you have collected for your own consumers and start creating marketing campaigns. It is that simple and it takes less than ten minutes not to only profile your database of prospects and consumers but also to find out if your male buyers have higher average order value than female buyers, if your female buyers has higher than your male buyers conversion rates, what days are the most favorable for marketing campaigns among male and female prospects.

How to Personalize Marketing Campaigns Using Gender Marketing Segmentation

Gender of your consumers is the only metric you should care about when thinking about personalizing marketing campaigns. Gender marketing segmentation is the only metric that can improve your conversion rate by 25%, your open rate by 50% and your retargeting rate by 30%, while reducing your churn. You might be wondering how you could take an advantage on gender marketing segmentation if you never collected consumer’s gender. The answer is very simple – you don’t really need to collect gender information in order to know consumer’s gender. All you need is consumer’s first name and a list of name by gender like the one that NameGenderPro.com has to offer. Name Gender Pro collected over 170k first names by gender from publically available data sources such as US Census, UK Census, Canada Census as well as from the social media. They cleaned the data, aggregated in one simple file and ensured that if you use this data you would match over 95% of your customer’s first names against the list collected by Name Gender Pro.

Once you have the list of first names by gender and once you match this list against your own database – you can profile your customers and find out if your female consumers have the higher average order size than male consumers (and if so – you might start thinking about gender specific pricing strategies). You can also find out if your male prospects might have higher conversion rate on business days and female consumers are buying more frequently on weekends. Knowing this valuable information will help you to design your next email marketing campaigns so you could speak their language. These are just two simple examples how you could use gender marketing segmentation with simple gender name list.

How Gender Based Marketing Segmentation Saved Email Marketing

Email channel that for years had been known as one of the most effective marketing channels slowly became an underdog of digital marketing. Open rates and click through rates had been declining while conversion rate have plummeted. While from the first look quality of the leads remained consistent, the same offers and promotions that used to deliver results, were no longer performing. This change hasn't happened overnight but was consistent and sound across most of the industries.

SaaS businesses were the first to recognize the issue and identify the problem. As it often happens – the devil was hidden in the detail: AAOEM (American Association of Email Marketers) reported in 2016 annual review that the volume of promotional and informational emails delivered to an inbox of an average consumer increased 8.5x in the last 4 years alone. This means that consumer’s “undivided” attention had been divided 8.5x times than before. AAOEM was able to build direct correlation between consumer’s response rate and volume of emails delivered to an inbox.

Email marketers attempted various segmentation and consumer personalization techniques until they discovered that adding gender based marketing segmentation improves open rates by over 35% and conversion rates by over 25%. It appears that personalizing design, content and offer based on consumer’s gender was the only variable capable to improve all conversion rates with no extra effort.

There are number of ways to add consumer’s gender. The most complicated and not always effective is to start asking consumers their gender as part of registration process. While this approach might deliver the most accurate insights, it would take time to aggregate the data, consumers added to the database before gender field is added, would still have no gender attached, not to mention that adding  a new field as part of the acquisition funnel would decrease conversion rates by 14%. Alternative solution would be using a tool such as NameGenderPro.com that already done all the work for you. Name Gender Pro scrapped official government databases of first names by gender and offers clean and consolidated list of over 177k unique first names broken down by male vs female vs. unisex names. Names by Gender are captured in csv file and marketers can simply download this file from NamGenderPro.com, match this file against their own database and start sending gender specific email campaigns

Why Ignoring Gender Marketing Segmentation is not an option for SaaS businesses

Why Gender Marketing Segmentation had been ignored by SaaS businesses:

SaaS business model first emerged a little over than 10 years ago from cable television subscription model and very quickly became a mainstream solution for many companies across different industries such as wireless subscriptions, gaming, online publishing and entertainment. SaaS companies were priding themselves for innovative strategies that impacted marketing and product usage decisions. SaaS companies were looking for simple yet effective solutions to accelerate the growth rates and they prefered minimalistic approaches to the acquisition funnel in order to improve lead gen conversion rates. Thus data collection techniques favored collecting from prospect as fever fields as possible in order to improve conversion rates and avoid unnecessary bumps in user’s experience. Unlike retail companies that were accustomed to collect many data points from consumer’s age to gender to segment to location and demographics, SaaS businesses were satisfied with only email and name. In a short run - they were able to improve conversion rates, however, in a long run - they hurt themselves without noticing.

How SaaS businesses could leverage ecommerce techniques without damaging conversion rates:

If the SaaS industry would like to better understand their consumers and target specific marketing segments, then they should look to the retail industry. There are various marketing techniques that could be adopted by SaaS companies from retailers. One of the most obvious strategies had been ignored by SaaS companies is gender marketing segmentation. Retails had been successfully using gender marketing segmentation for years. Most of the time, retail companies would collect gender of consumers during the very first purchase and then they would use this information to build email marketing campaigns and re-target via display platforms. Successful SaaS companies instead of adding an additional data fields at registration flow started matching first names of their prospects and consumers against list of first name by gender. First name by gender is publically available government collected information available via US Census. One of the approaches would be scrapping name gender information from publically available sources, cleaning this data, removing outliers and then matching against database of first names that company collected. Alternative approach that saves time is accessing list of first names by gender collected by one of the name gender vendors such as NameGenderPro.com. Name Gender Pro collected over 177k unique names broken down by gender. They cleaned the data for you, they removed outliers and then also made it available for simple download either in excel (csv) or sql format. Now all you need is to download the name gender file, match your own customer’s information against NameGenderPro.com and start analyzing your own data and building marketing strategies and campaigns in no time. Study shows that companies using gender based segmentation were able to improve conversion rates by over 30%, open rates by over 25% and re-targeting outreach by over 40%.

Empowering SaaS Conversion Rates with Gender Marketing Segmentation

How SaaS businesses have fallen behind with consumer segmentation:

SaaS (software-as-a-Service) is one of the the fastest growing business models that in less than 10 than increased the size of the global market 16x from $5.56 billion in 2008 to over $92.75 in 2016. Its projected to grow to a whopping $132.57 billion by 2020. In order to support this accelerated growth rates SaaS marketers had been priding themselves for offering innovative and efficient data driven solutions that improve conversion and acquisition rates at much higher pace than traditional ecommerce acquisition campaigns. As result of the new fast-paced SaaS reality - “old” database marketing strategies became outdated and many metrics that for years used to benefit traditional marketers were no longer collected. Gender Marketing Segmentation became one of the first metric that SaaS businesses eliminated from the data driven decision making.

Gender Based vs Gender Neutral Marketing Segmentation:

Excluding gender based marketing segmentation from the traditional marketing decision making might have helped to optimize conversion rates in a short term (as marketers had one less field to collect data for), however, it appeared to have a negative impact in a long run as the ability to fully benefit from consumer’ behavioral analysis was limited. SaaS model assumed that software is a “gender neutral” product. Marketers assumed that product usage and acquisition behavior are the same for both male and female users.  Thus marketers didn’t bother creating different product experience or launch different marketing campaign for female and male consumers.

How to leverage gender marketing segmentation:

Study conducted by that including gender segmentation as part of the marketing strategy can increase your email open rates by over 25%, conversion rates by over 30%, click through rates by over 25% and retargeting rates by over 40%. Gender marketing segmentation is one of the easiest and yet under-utilized segmentations that marketers very often forget to leverage. The easiest way to get started is to download list of first names by gender from NameGenderPro.com and match their list against your own database by first name. NameGenderPro.com consolidated by far the largest name-gender list available for marketers. NameGenderPro’s database includes over 177k unique first names by gender (names by female and unisex) collected from publically available data sources such as US Census, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand Census as well as social media. Once you download list from NameGenderPro.com you can start analyzing your data and coming up with gender marketing strategy that suits your company’s objectives in less than 10 minutes

How to leverage gender marketing segmentation for SaaS:

Study conducted by Association of Online Marketers (AOM) shows that including gender segmentation as part of the marketing strategy can increase  conversion rates by over 30%, open rates by over 25% and re-targeting outreach by over 40%. It also appears that in order to benefit from the gender marketing segmentation businesses don’t need to make any changes to lead gen flow by adding a ‘gender field’.  To start analyzing your consumer’s gender business can access name gender list from a vendor like NameGenderPro.com. Name Gender Pro offers a list of over 177k first names broken down by gender. NameGenderPro have done all the heavy lifting - they scrapped publically, available data sources such as US Census, UK Census, Canada Census and Australia Census. They cleaned up the list and now you can access this list and start matching your list of first name collected from your consumers against NameGenderPro list in no time and with minimum effort. Once you download list from NameGenderPro.com you can start analyzing your data and come up with gender marketing strategy that fits your company’s objectives in less than 10 minutes.