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How Does Client Sense Help You Segment Your Contacts

This article explains how to divide your firm’s contacts into groups worth communicating with differently, using individual and company characteristics and understanding your level of engagement with these contacts.

In this article:

Short answer

Segmenting means dividing your contacts into groups that should hear different messages. Client Sense supports this by identifying attributes of the person such as job title and location, by identifying attributes of their company such as industry and size, and by providing insights on the relationship itself, meaning how recently and how much your firm has been in contact with that individual or company.

Why it matters

Sending content to everyone is sometimes the default state of professional services marketing, and it is expensive in a way that does not show up on any budget line. Recipients stop opening messages, partners lose confidence in the channel, and the one communication that genuinely mattered to a particular audience arrives in a stream of things that did not.

Firms struggle because segmentation depends on fields most CRM or email marketing systems do not reliably hold. You cannot segment by industry without industry data, or by seniority without job titles, and where those fields depend on manual entry, they are often populated for only a minority of contacts. A segment built on a field only a third of your contacts carry is not a segment, it is a sample.

What this looks like in practice

A worked example: a firm wants to promote a new employment law service. Sending to all contacts reaches mostly people with no interest. A segment of general counsel and heads of HR, at companies over a certain size, in industries the firm already serves, that the firm has had contact with in the past two years, is a fraction of the size and several times more likely to produce a conversation.

How to do it in Client Sense

Segmenting draws on enriched data, so it is worth confirming what your firm actually holds before designing anything. See What is the Company Insights service? for the company-level fields.

Segment by individual characteristics

The Details tab searches across job titles, industries, locations, any custom fields your firm has created, and matter or client information from your financial system where connected. Enter a term, choose which fields it should match against, and add further terms to narrow the result. A search combining a role, a sector and a city returns the people who satisfy all three rather than a list you then filter by hand.

Where a field belongs to the company rather than the person, industry being the usual case, the field name carries an Org prefix and you need to select the option to search within the custom fields of an individual’s parent organization. Steps are in How to use the Search functionality.

Segment by company characteristics

Where Company Insights is enabled, industry and company size by employee count are available across search, reports, Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) Lists and Favorites (Favourites) tabs. This is what allows you to create a segment such as manufacturing companies above a certain headcount.

Segment by relationship

The most useful dimension and the one firms most often overlook. A Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List can use relationship measures such as Emails Sent Quantity and Emails Received Quantity as rules, which means a segment can distinguish between a contact your firm speaks to regularly and one it has not spoken to in years. The same communication should rarely go to both.

Save the segment

Results from a Details search can be saved with Add to Favorites at the foot of the results, which captures the whole set rather than adding people one at a time. That produces a Static Favorite (Favourite) List, fixed at the moment you saved it. Where the segment needs to stay current, build it as a Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List instead, so membership updates as the data changes. Both are covered in How to Create and Manage Favorite (Favourite) Lists.

Note: Check coverage before you commit. If you plan to segment on job title, export a sample and count how many contacts carry one. 

Turning the output into action

  • Start from the message. Decide what you want to say, then work out who you want to engage with this content. 
  • Keep the number small. Four or five standing segments that people understand beat twenty without a clear content differentiation. 
  • Test the size before you design the campaign. A segment of eleven people does not need a campaign; it needs eleven phone calls.
  • Layer relationship on top of profile. The same industry segment split by whether contact is recent or dormant usually deserves two different messages.
  • Make it a Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List if it will be reused. Anything you will send to more than once should update itself.

Common pitfalls

  • Segmenting on fields you do not have. Check coverage first. This is the single most common cause of a segment that underperforms for no apparent reason.
  • Over-segmenting. Every additional criterion shrinks the audience and adds work. Stop when the message would genuinely differ.
  • Ignoring opt-outs. A contact flagged as unsubscribed in your connected system belongs out of the sending list regardless of how well they fit the segment.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What can we segment on?

Job title, location and any custom fields your firm has created, at the person level. Industry and company size, at the company level, where Company Insights is enabled. And volume of contact, through fields such as Emails Sent Quantity and Emails Received Quantity, which describe the relationship rather than the contact.

How do I search by industry?

Use the Details tab. Industry belongs to the company rather than the person, so the field carries an Org prefix and you need to select the option to search within the custom fields of the individual’s parent organization.

Can we combine criteria?

Yes. Add each term in turn and the result narrows, so a search can return the people who match a role and a sector and a location rather than any one of them.

How do we save a segment we will use again?

A Details search can be saved in one action using Add to Favorites at the foot of the results, which creates a Static Favorite (Favourite) List. Where the membership needs to stay current, build a Dynamic Favorite (Favourite) List instead so it updates itself.

Why does our segment look smaller than expected?

Usually because one of the fields is sparsely populated. Job titles depend on the Signature Analysis module and industry depends on Company Insights, so a segment using both will be limited to contacts carrying both.

Should we segment by seniority or by industry?

It depends on what changes the message. If a general counsel and a finance director need to hear different things, segment by role. If a manufacturer and a healthcare provider need different things, segment by industry. Segmenting on a dimension that does not change the content adds work without benefit.

How many segments should we have?

Fewer than most firms build. Four or five that colleagues can name and describe are more useful than twenty that exist only in a system, because segments only work when the people writing the content understand them.