Effective Ways to Segment Customers and Elicit Response to Campaigns
You may have a massive email list and a catchy marketing campaign, but even with all that, you can fail to generate a decent conversion rate. After weeks of planning, strategizing and creating your marketing campaign, the response rate falls flat after the launch.
Chances are that if a marketing campaign fails or doesn’t fetch an ideal response rate despite having great content, it can be because you are just not focusing on the right target audience. Or your target audience is too broad that your message loses relevancy and misses the mark.
Micro Segmentation is the Way to Go
What you need is a laser-sharp segmentation strategy that enables you to direct campaigns at the right subset of your audience. A sharper segmentation has the potential to generate higher response rates.
How?
Just try and visualize a dartboard which represents your entire market. While you may fling those darts at the board and be happy with whatever segment you hit, isn’t it smarter to aim at those segments which give you the highest score?
Well, that’s exactly why you need to consider sharpening your segments and refine targeting to guide your darts and hit the bull’s eye!
Steps for Getting Started with Segmentation
Instead of sending the same message to all your prospects (that can be a major turn-off), segmenting your customers and then running personalized campaigns across the segments is more effective.
80% of consumers today are more likely to do business with a brand that personalizes their communication.
Here’s how you can get started with sharpening your customer segments for a cutting edge campaign performance:
Step 1: Know Your Customer
Capture all customer transaction data in a single place so you can use that data to understand more about your customers. Whether be it a customer relationship management portal, CDP, billing database or any other customer data warehouse, you require valid data to build your customer segments.
Step 2: Analyze Customer Data to Derive Common Fields of Segmentation Criteria
The next step is to develop a formula or a set of criteria to bifurcate customers into different segments and derive common fields that could represent customer behaviour. You should strive to go beyond demographics into customer behaviour segmentation. Some examples of fields include average number of transactions, average monthly balance, purchase frequency, etc.
Step 3: Assign Values to Identified Fields
Now, it’s time to assign values, build rules or queries to ensure that the values are calculated for each customer in real-time or updated at least by the end of each day.
Step 4: Align Segmentation with Campaign Goals
Once you have identified field and assigned values, the business side of segmentation begins. Determine your campaign goals and visualize the type of unique segments specific to your business that would be required. And decide what outcome you are hoping for, so you can develop the right segmentation strategy to accomplish that.
Step 5: List the Fields and Assign Values
Based on your segmentation strategy make a list of fields or parameters that would be most appropriate for the campaign and assign a value range for each field.
Step 6: Define Core Segmentation Criteria
Use the most important fields from the identified list and segment customers into groups of choice. Also, identify the number of eligible customers.
Step 7: Test and Refine
Customer Segments can be used across all your ad campaigns including Google Ads. Click here to download a free guide to 42 affinity audience segments in Google Ads.
Best Practices to Master Segmentation for Sharper Targeting
There is no sure-fire formula to master segmentation. Use these tips and experiment to find what works for your business:
* Consider Psychographics
* Begin Segmentation at the level of entry
* Create customer personas to understand customers
* Determine which segments derive the most value
* Pick a niche
* Forecast ahead to cast your nets into the future
* Go beyond data
* Utilize analytics
* Create a personalized approach
* Gather data from customer feedback and surveys
A message targeting all, targets none. Get your segmentation right and as sharp as possible to hone in on the specific subset of customers that present the biggest opportunities and efficient use of resources.
Adopting such a strategy can make a world of difference between success and failure in eliciting greater response for your campaigns.
You can consider using an automated platform, to select a strategic goal you want to pursue, analyze data to build your segments, and craft a personalized campaign that converts each target segment. Use the marketing stack you have – or augment it to suit your requirements, to leverage larger datasets and programmatic machine learning.
Know of any other ways to segment better and drive response? Let us know in the comments below or write to us at marketing@xerago.com.
