Segmenting customer data is widely practiced as a useful way to harvest insights specific to market segments. These enable you to target your advertising better and deliver more personalised customer experience. Here are five key ways to segment your customer data:
1.Through ‘Blank Slate’ Customer Surveys
When you know little or even nothing about your customer segments, the first way to start segmenting data is to run simple market research. Running surveys and focus groups within a community matching your ideal customer profile will help you glean what matters to potential customers. What’s more, in the process you may identify useful segments you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
There is an exception – when your product is truly innovative, ‘real world’ prospective customers might lack the frame of reference and concepts to help you understand more about your product. Even so, most products are based around familiar ‘jobs to be done’ – the objectives potential customers share.
2.Through Customer Demographics
There are often common cultural or age-group-specific patterns in customer behaviour and desires. Although segmentation details such as age, income, race, gender and location can yield insights, it’s important to keep in mind that making decisions based on sensitive customer details such as gender or race can be regarded as discriminatory and even illegal.
3.Via Customer Listening
Seeing what customers are saying on forums, reviews sites, and in conversation with customer service teams via chat, email and other channels is also useful for segmenting customers. Many businesses have informal conversations with customers via social media that also yield useful insights. Use these sources to understand the VOC (voice of consumer) of your happiest customers as well as your most dissatisfied customers.
4.Through Customer Usage Patterns
One of the most useful forms of segmentation now available, thanks to advances in digital analytics, is trackable customer behaviour. Heatmaps and recording tools, for example, show the patterns in where customers click or what parts of your website they tend to use most regularly.
You can harvest and use this data to deliver a better customer journey (for example, you can use it to eliminate the most common distractions that cause customers to abandon their carts during checkout).
5.Via Lookalike Audiences
Another useful way to segment customer data is by grouping customers who have similar purchasing patterns. You know how Amazon shows you a list of items beneath a product saying ‘Customers who bought this also like this’? This type of insight is applicable not only to purchases. You can also segment customers according to the different ways they engage commonly with your business.
Do you need help segmenting customer data in the above ways or otherwise? Contact Interact RDT today to get going.