Segmentation (email and mobile marketing segmentation) is the practice of organizing and tweaking both the delivery and message of your communications based upon your various audiences' likeliness to respond favorably to it. Accordingly, the opposite of segmentation is blasting all of your leads, clients, major clients, friends, family, and any stray animals that may have stumbled into your sign-up forms with the fire hose of potentially irrelevant calls to action. Studies have shown that segmented campaigns yield better open and click rates and, generally, a correctly segmented campaign will feed your subscribers info they want to receive and are therefore more likely to act upon (favorably). So, yes, if you can segment you definitely should!

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Last Thursday, the Congruent Media team of Emily, Brian and Sean took an opportunity to pour wine at one of Greater Baltimore Technology Council's regular wine tasting events. It was a great night of networking. Of course, what networking event centered around wine (and a few unusual beers) wouldn't be?

Between telling tasters about Congruent Media, and the Australian wine we poured, we also managed to get people to fill out a short survey. (We enticed them with a Starbucks giftcard for their troubles.) The survey was simple: "Rate your company's activity level in the following areas: email marketing, SEO, PPC, banner advertising, lead generation, lead nurturing, social media, mobile marketing and overall internet strategy." The results were interesting. Remember, this was a tech crowd. 

SEO

27% of the respondents replied "none" to Search Engine Optimization activity.  Another 27% replied with "Beginner." So 54% of the companies surveyed replied with beginner or none? Wow. Remember, this is a tech crowd. Effective SEO should be instituted at ALL companies, if for nothing else than reputation management.

Email Marketing

1 in 5 respondents said they do not do any type of email marketing. Another 1 in 5 declared their company at the beginner's level. Email marketing is a very cost efficient way of beginning and maintaining client relationships, yet almost 50% of the companies surveyed were at the beginning stages or not using it at all. Again, this was a tech crowd too.

This is just a sample of the data. Watch out for the full report, hitting your Congruent Media website shortly. Disclaimer: this data is the farthest thing possible from scientific, it was collected at a wine tasting afterall. Still, the responses are interesting.

How would you rate your company's activity level in the above areas? Is your company taking advantage of the internet's cost-efficient and effective marketing power?

Oh, and if you'd like to see the rest of the pics from that night, check them out here.

After a 6% sales tax on technology services was passed in the special session last fall (literally in the middle of the night) the Team at Congruent Media worked with the Tech Council of Maryland and the Maryland Chamber of Commerce to build FightTheTechTax.com.

The purpose of the website was to provide information about the tax and to help people express their opinions to the appropriate people in quick and easy ways - phone, email and snail mail.

For those who wanted to make calls, the site allowed users to find the appropriate legislators for their districts and provided the accurate phone numbers for them.

For those who preferred email, we provided a customizable template and the search tools to select the appropriate email recipients. These consisted of Delegates, Senators and Governor O'Malley for the sender's districts.

The website was launched in a very grassroots manner, with the main players emailing colleagues and business associates about the tax. As a viral marketing play, we provided Fight the Tech Tax buttons which showed-up in many a blog post helping to brand the mission and generate traffic to the main website. Many of the members also added information to their internal enewsletters.

It was very cool to track all of the site activity over the past few months. We watched traffic and site actions spike as the press paid more attention to the growing lobby against the tax. After one hit on WJZ we saw the email system use increase 5x the next day. As bloggers worked their keyboards, we saw referral traffic to the site rise. Cross-linking with members and other organizations helped to make sure all of the bases were covered.

In all, it was a great lesson in how to empower people to have their voice heard -- in the right way. By taking the time to put together an easy to use system, we enabled a lot of folks to direct their concerns to those who matter without bombarding legislators out their districts. It used to be that it wasn't so easy to find all of that contact info. Now automated systems make it a snap.

Over the past few months the system generated over 4,500 targeted emails, untold phone calls and a lot buzz. We saw it and the lawmakers did too.

We weren't alone though as Tom Loveland and John Eckenrode, co-Founders of the Maryland Computer Services Association, did a bang-up job in bringing support for the repeal as well building a team of lobbyists and communications pros to push the right buttons. Tom became somewhat the "face" of the fight and did a great job in all of the interviews as well as keeping folks up to speed on the activity. I was impressed to receive updates from Tom late on the weekend with instructions on where to meet the next morning.

All of this is a great example of how groups can rally together to fight for something they believe in. Early on it was said that this law was not going away, but through everyone's continued efforts right down to the last minute, we were all able to get the gov't to make the change we believe in. Sweet.