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How to Create a Marketo Segmentation

Written By Frank Strube

January 12, 2023

In my previous blog post, I talked about the importance of using Marketo’s Segmentation feature to improve your customer engagement and personalize your marketing efforts. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing a four-part blog series on how to use Marketo Segmentations to personalize your cross-channel marketing. Throughout this series, I will take you through the process of creating a truly cross-channel campaign that leverages Marketo Segmentations to drive relevant messaging in emails, on the web, and in direct mail.

For the purposes of this example, we’ve created a fictitious company: Revify. Revify is a fintech start-up. We will be orchestrating a multi-channel marketing campaign to drive qualified leads to a landing page. We’ll break down the walkthrough into four parts to cover the steps for each marketing channel.

Part 1: Creating the Segmentation

Part 2: Creating a Landing Page

Part 3: Creating an Email Campaign

Part 4: Creating a Direct Mail Campaign with Banjo

Be sure to follow along as we go through the process step-by-step. Now without further adieu, let’s jump in to Part 1!

Part 1: Creating the Segmentation

Creating a Segmentation in Marketo is relatively straightforward. I’ll show you how to do that in a moment, but first let’s prepare our demo environment with some data. For the purposes of our walkthrough, we’ll be using this list of 1,000 fake people. I’m going to go ahead and create a new Static List and import the data there. If you would like to use the sample data list I reference in the video below, you can download it here.

Now, let’s create some Segmentations. You’ll need to access the “Database” tab in the Marketo platform. From there, you can create a new Segmentation by right-clicking the “Segmentations” folder and clicking the “New Segmentation” option. This will open a menu where you can give your Segmentation a name and add as many Segments as you want to create.

Once you’ve named your Segmentation and added your Segments, you can start defining the criteria for each Segment. This is where you’ll specify the characteristics or behaviors that make up your Segment. You can use a variety of different criteria, including custom fields.

We’re going to create two Segmentations. One for Gender and one for Job Title.

Here are some tips for defining the criteria for your Segments:

  • Start by identifying the key characteristics or behaviors that you want to target. For example, you might want to create Segments based on customer demographics, purchase history, or website behavior.
  • Use a combination of different criteria to create more precise Segments. For example, you might want to create a Segment that includes customers who are over the age of 50 and have made at least two purchases in the last six months.
  • Segment names must be unique across all of your Workspaces. If you’re using multiple workspaces, be sure to follow a naming convention that will yield unique segment names.
  • Use custom fields to add additional data to your Segments. For example, you might want to create a custom field for customer preferences, which you can use to create Segments based on specific interests or preferences.
  • If you want to use Custom Objects to define your Segments, you will need to implement some workarounds since Custom Objects are not available as a Smart List filter for a Segment. See this Marketo blog article for more information.

In conclusion, creating a Segmentation in Marketo is a simple and effective way to target your marketing efforts and personalize your messaging. By dividing your audience into smaller groups based on common characteristics or behaviors, you can create more relevant and engaging marketing campaigns. In the next part of our blog series, we’ll show you how to create a landing page that leverages the Marketo Segmentations you just created. Stay tuned!