Account Lists
Account lists represent a subset of your total addressable market and serve various strategic purposes. Account lists allow you to narrow down accounts to those that are the best fit for your company objectives. Common reasons for creating account lists include:
- See a list of accounts owned by a specific person.
- Target accounts by tier, industry, region, or size.
- Serve ad campaigns to specific accounts.
Accounts can belong to multiple account lists. Account lists are a tool for experimentation; you can create and refine them to determine which ones yield the best results. Once you have confidence in your account list(s), you can use segments to further divide these lists into groups tailored for different products or services.
See Understanding Account Lists, The Heart of Your ABM Strategy.
Segments
Unlike account lists, an account can belong to only one group within a segment.
For example, Account A might be included in both an Industry segment and a State segment. Within the Industry segment, it might belong to the Financial Services group, and within the State segment, it might belong to the California group. If these segments are used for Ad Campaigns, Account A would see ads tailored to Financial Services and California.
This distinction is crucial because it ensures that the appropriate customer experience is delivered using specific criteria.
Segments Create Fields, Account Lists Do Not
One key difference between segments and account lists is that segments generate fields in Demandbase. When you create a segment, Demandbase creates a field with the segment name, helping you identify which segment each account belongs to. We append the word (segment) to the end of a segment field name to differentiate it from other data, for example, Industry (segment).
You can use these segment fields in different areas such as selectors, columns, Analytics, Journeys, Ads, and Site Customization.
See Understanding Fields.