Audience segments are powerful for the following reason: in order to achieve successful marketing, two conditions need to be met:
- Relevant Content
- To the relevant people
Personalization here is key, and this is what audience segments helps to achieve. 77% of email marketing ROI comes from segmented campaigns. This is because simply casting a wide net isn’t the best approach. Certain campaigns resonate with certain people, and you need to make sure your content is reaching the right people. Let’s take a closer look.
What is Audience Segmentation
Audience segmentation is a process in marketing where the wide target market is broken down into smaller, more relevant subsets. These subsets, or segments, are then met with more relevant content to them.
This can be via outreach marketing, or it can be within the website. It means that personalized experiences are offered on a larger scale than before. These subsets can be based on different things such as behavior, demographics, industry, location & more.
Why Is It Important?
We all know the importance of personalization by now. Offering personalized experiences will boost your entire eCommerce experience. Personalization has been used in commerce for as long as it has been around, and the online experience offers new benefits to that. One of these being personalization at scale, or audience segmentation.
Rather than needing to cater to each individual shopper to give them the personalized experience they expect, audience segments cut the hassle. By creating groups, multiple people are offered personalized experiences at the same time. This can save your business time and money.
Furthermore, it will boost sales and customer satisfaction. This is because shoppers don’t want to view content that isn’t relevant to them. If you reach out to shoppers via email or SMS marketing, in order for it to be worthwhile it should be something that the shoppers are actually interested in.
If it’s not, they will feel unvalued and used as a customer. If it is, they will feel as though you are trying to help them. This boosts customer satisfaction and sales at the same time.
Lastly, through analytics systems, audience segments can help you to understand your customers better. Through tracking the progress of each campaign you can come to know what works and what doesn’t for your customers. This can help you build a more successful strategy moving forwards with new marketing campaigns and offerings.
How To Segment Audiences
One of the simplest ways to segment audiences is through available demographic data you have on your website. This can have been gathered through people signing up to be members, or making purchases. Or simply through them browsing your site. For example:
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Industry
- Type of device used
However these may not be the most effective methods of gathering information. Creating audience segments through their online behavior may be a more effective and sustainable method. This can be gathered through website activity, for example click profiles, or how long was spent on each page.
This can be gathered throughout their customer journey over search, collections, autocomplete dropdown, product recommendation widgets and more. Furthermore, purchase behavior can help create segments. This can give you insight into what the shoppers were most interested in, and what they ended up wanting.
Examples Of Audience Segments
Some examples of audience segments are:
- Loyal shoppers
- Frequent buyers
- Search abandoners
- High intent shoppers
- Recent buyers
In order to make these more specific, time frames can also be added to this. For example:
- Frequent buyers in the last week
- Search bandoners in the past month
- Loyal shoppers in the last six months
Adding these time variables can help create more accurate segments with better results.
Data Privacy Protection
Using online behavioral profile data to create audience segments has the added benefit of not infringing any data privacy regulations. As the world moves towards a cookie free future, where all data should be consensually collected, or should not infringe on private information- click profile data works perfectly.
Noone’s data security has to be breached, and at the same time personalized experiences can be offered. Both through outreach marketing, and during the online experience.
Conclusion
Overall, offering audience segmentation only provides benefits to your business. Increasing sales, improving customer satisfaction and effectively offering personalized experiences are all on the table. If you haven’t started using it yet, now is the time.