Gender Based Marketing Segmentation That Works For Every Business

This article is brought to you by NameGenderPro.com: leading name-gender data and research provider in gender, marketing and consumer behavior

Businesses (especially SaaS products) built upon creating consumer-focused services and products are oftentimes lacking in personalized experiences and content. Prospects and customers are treated the same, regardless of the acquisition channel they come from, their buying intent, geo segmentation, gender or anything else that would require a personalized approach. In recent years, advertising has taken a shift towards personalization, yet, many businesses have yet to catch on. Companies, big and small, are comfortable spending time, money and resources on traditional marketing channels that oftentimes won’t have positive ROI. Yet they vigorously resist trying basic consumer segmentation and personalization that requires no budget or resources.

Adding consumer personalization to your traditional marketing toolkit may be frightening, especially for small to medium size companies with limited resources. You would ask yourself, “Where to start? How to measure results? What resources are required and how much time would it take to see the benefits?” All these are valid questions, but what if in order to get started you didn’t need any additional resources, and could still capture 80% of the benefits? What if instead of trying new acquisition channels (just because everyone else does it), you could use something that didn’t require budget YET would guarantee positive ROI? What if you were sitting on this all along and simply didn’t know how to enable it? The good news — if you continue reading this post, you’ll learn how to personalize your content, increase your conversion rates and improve engagement without spending additional money on expensive tools or hiring new staff.

Gender Based Marketing Segmentation is a single consumer personalization technique that can deliver 80% of the benefits with less than 20% of resources. There’s plenty of research which showcases that knowing the gender of the customers receiving your newsletters, email campaigns and other personalized marketing collateral is the single most important personalization metric that can increase your conversion rates overnight without doing anything else.

How Do I Get Started with Gender-Based Marketing Segmentation?

The easiest way to get started with gender-based marketing segmentation is by using tools like NameGenderPro.com. Name Gender Pro helps determine the gender of customers by their first name. It is a database of first names by gender collected from publically available governmental data sources such as US Census, UK Census, Canada Census and etc as well as from social media. NameGenderPro is a simple plug-and-play method that guarantees a 95 percent match rate for your own customers and the list of names you would receive from Name Gender Pro. Once you download NameGenderPro list of names — you own it (which means you don’t need to integrate any APIs or pay recurring fees)

Here’s a quick overview of how to getting started with gender-based segmentation works:

• Download the list of 177K first names by gender from NameGenderPro.com
• Upload the list to your transaction database. NameGenderPro offers csv and sql files, making it easier to upload into your local database in as little as 10 minutes. There are two columns in the NameGenderPro.com file — one for first name and the other for gender.
• Begin matching the list of NameGenderPro first names with your own list of users. To get started — run the same reports you normally would with the new column for a gender that now you have available. You’ll be truly amazed what you can learn about your prospects just by adding this one metric
• Now you’re ready to create your own marketing campaigns and see for yourself how personalizing marketing message based on consumer’s gender can boost your performance

Gender Based Marketing That Works

Your businesses won’t get a second chance to make a good first impression. The instant a prospect comes to your website is the most important interaction point, so you have only 30 to 60 seconds to grab a site visitor’s attention “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around.” (Steve Jobs)

Developing marketing content that resonates with particular audiences is essential for conversion. Knowing something as simple as whether a customer is male or female can be a game changer for the type of content you use.

The following case study shows trends that may vary from company to company but would be directionally the same for all gender neutral businesses

How do we know that gender segmentation really matters?

• The amount of women prospects is 1.56x higher than men. This number will vary from product to product, but it’s consistent for product neutral SaaS and e-commerce businesses. Metrics like this can really change how businesses approach their marketing strategies, so it’s important to know this ratio for your business.
• Females were found to have an average order value of 5 to 9 percent beneath males. This presents a grand opportunity for businesses to optimize pricing strategies and promotions.
• When it comes to the value of male and female leads, it was found that female leads had a 20 percent higher lifetime value than males. This is just an additional reason to target women in your marketing collateral, including paid search, web content and email channel

How to identify gender marketing opportunities to optimize, personalize and grow?

Key areas to focus on include gender marketing segmentation by acquisition channel and day of the week. This will allow your business to identify basic metrics and learn how gender marketing segmentation can grow your business. You will then be able to identify opportunities to use gender marketing to improve, innovate, grow and optimize your campaigns.

Here’s how the different metrics can be utilized to benefit your company:

Weekends vs weekdays for gender-based marketing segments:

• The amount of women registering during the weekend is 10 percent higher than those who register throughout the week. Males are the exact opposite, with more men registering on weekdays. How to put this to use? Try re-targeting campaigns for weekends and make changes to your email marketing calendar.
• The conversion rates for female leads into paid subscribers is on average 22 percent higher on the weekend. For males, the conversion rate is 40 percent higher on week days. This is a major difference in conversion rates, and it’s very telling of how you can optimize your weekday and weekend ads to accommodate consumers by gender.
• The annual contract value for both genders is 20 percent higher for those who register on the weekends. This gives businesses even more reason to focus more on targeting weekend shoppers.
• The average order value for females is six percent lower on weekends. For men, the AOV is relatively steady throughout the week.

There are a number of factors found when observing the acquisition channels of males and females that visit sites for the first time

• The highest conversion rates among female buyers stem from those who use organic and paid search channels. The conversion rates are 20 percent lower for those that go directly to the site/page.
• The highest conversion rates among male buyers come from organic search, followed by paid search channels. Those stemming from direct channels have 20 to 30 percent lower conversion rates compared to organic search.
• Organic channel drives consumers (both male and female) with the highest lifetime value. This is followed by paid search and direct, with consumer lifetime value more than 20 percent lower than these coming from organic search.
• Direct channel buyers have the highest average order value, with women taking the lead with 29 percent and men with 21 percent (compared to paid and organic search).
• Promo codes are highly effective among female buyers, who are more likely to use them. Sixty-seven percent of the revenue from promo codes are from female buyers. This is seen across all acquisition channels.

Gender Marketing Ideas That Work For Every Business

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that gender-based marketing segmentation is the wave of the future, especially for SaaS businesses. According to the case study below, you will see how gender-based marketing segmentation can help businesses identify trends and opportunities never seen before. It’s apparent that male and female buyers have varying behaviors, which dictate the profits and conversion rates for SaaS companies. The marketing campaigns that are successful will take into account the differences between the genders and use that knowledge to develop winning strategies. Focusing on what men and women like about a particular product will make it easier to convince them to make the purchase. And more importantly, in the end, you will have happier customers, which will in turn boost retention and growth rates.

Gender marketing is nothing new, as it has been used for decades by retailers. However, many companies have continued to overlook this key factor in their marketing campaigns and are leaving lots of money on the table in doing so. Gender marketing isn’t like other campaigns and strategies that are risky, and don’t guarantee a positive ROI. To the contrary, when gender marketing is adopted, it can guarantee an immediate increase in lead generation, conversions (while reducing churn), lifetime value, retention, product usage and consumer satisfaction.

Ideas that work: how to jump start gender marketing segmentation.

Companies can begin incorporating gender marketing into its campaigns today. It’s simple to do and highly effective, as shown with the following marketing efforts:

Email marketing:

• Email campaigns are typically developed into segments to offer a more personalized experience. Now, companies can create campaigns around male and female prospects.
• Visual design of emails are developed based on male and female prospects and customers.
• Creating promotions around the consumer’s gender.
• Pushing out emails at specific times and days of the week based on when they’re most likely to convert (i.e. weekend for females and weekdays for men).
• Pricing models based on gender — keep in mind that female buyers have a higher contract value over the long-term, but lower average order values during the first transaction.

On-Site Experience

• Pricing models that are presented, to attract both male and female buyers.
• Language used in marketing content and the structure of the content.
• The overall website design
• Descriptions of products and the images used
• Blog content written to fit the psychology of male and female visitors
• Promotions and offers displayed on the site
• Testimonials and other social proof from men and women customers, which play into how each gender thinks and what they are looking for in a product.

Paid search and re-targeting campaigns:

• Pricing models based on men and women buying habits
• Offers and promotions that will attract female and male buyers
• Landing pages with designs, content, ad copy, descriptions and CTA for each gender

Businesses can no longer overlook the many benefits gender marketing can offer their companies. There is plenty of proof showing how it can potentially boost your conversion rates and profits, and the risk is low.