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%.