Customer Segmentation: The Secret to Powerful Marketing Personalisation
Everyone knows that personalised marketing increases sales revenue. Great, but that only begs the question: How do you personalise marketing? The answer, ladies and gents, is segmentation.
Segment for More Sales
We—marketers, business owners and managers—get too hung up on filling the sales funnel. We want to pump our pipeline.
Sadly, by obsessing over the beginning, we actually give ourselves much more work at the end. There’s an easy way to make the entire sales process or customer journey frictionless.
Funnel, Filter, Funnel
Don’t just lump everyone who has entered the funnel together!
Categorise them. Create good lists based on the information you’ve gleaned from getting them into the funnel.
“86% of consumers say that personalised marketing influences their buying choices”— Infosys
That way, you can send them strategic communication specifically engineered to lead them through the rest of the funnel to purchase and then become a lifetime customer.[/vc_column_text]
Why is Data Segmentation Important?
Better Segmentation; Better Marketing Personalisation
It really all comes down to sending relevant, targeted messages to your audience.
In case you missed it, you can read about Why Marketing Personalisation Matters here.
Segmenting your database allows you to enhance customer relationship management by sending relevant, personalised communication.
Strengthened relationships increase brand loyalty and advocacy. Your customers aren’t looking at anyone else (because their needs are fulfilled), and they’ll encourage others to buy from you, too.
Greater trust means that they are more likely to up up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. All in all, it allows you to get more out of your existing customers, lowering sales costs.
It costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than to market to an existing one”— Famous Digital Media
You can re-engage dormant customers with an exclusive offer that resonates with their preferences. In the same way, you can revive old leads that previously did not convert. You’d be amazed at how a simple message that shows you remember someone and “know” them can do for sales.
You can automate personalised marketing, which allows you to nurture clients while freeing up sales and support resources.
Additionally, you can pin-point people based on specific behaviour or other parameters to conduct market research. You can use what you gather to improve customer experience or even develop new products.
Finally, you can use segmentation to single out the customers that never give you qualms to ask for online reviews or referrals.
How Should I Segment My Database?
Great question! You never know what you might need as your business scales and communication needs evolve. For this reason, try to capture as much information as possible to filter your lists by virtually any criteria.
Use this list as a basis. Be sure to add fields that would be relevant to your business and communication strategy.
- Age
- Gender
- Title
- Marital status
- Children
- Home language
- Education
- Occupation
- Designation
- Geographic location
- Hobbies
- Birthday
- Date joined as a customer
- Customer value (RFM)
- Recency
- Frequency
- Monetary value
- High-value customer (HVCs)
- Types of purchases
- Average spend per shop
- Channel through which they were acquired
- Preferred method of commutation
Only if these fields are absolutely relevant to your marketing, you can also add ethnicity or religion. As a rule (especially in light of POPIA), if you don’t need it, don’t collect it.
Use Lead Qualification to Start Segmenting Your Database
Leverage the work you’re doing to qualify prospects. Let’s say you run a lead generation campaign with a lead magnet. You would typically use the landing page to capture lead details.
Now, you can take it one step further by using strategic CTA’s and navigation on the landing page to qualify leads. You can start calling the red hot leads and pop the lukewarm ones into a lead nurturing sequence.
The beauty of this strategy is that you’ll be capturing qualitative, accurate and up-to-date information into your database from day one. Quality in; quality out
You might also like these related articles.
Planning your Digital Marketing Strategy for 2021
Why Customer Relationship Management Software is the Best Gift for Your Business