Segmentation for the customer benefit

Today it is hard to be a smart marketer. The landscape is so board when communicating with customers and it is easy to be ignored. To be more effective it is necessary to be relevant and personal. It is no longer okay to be poorly targeted with your message. The delete function on email, voice mail, switching channels, all give customers the power to choose who they engage with and so marketing segmentation has never been so important. B2Bmarketing describe it as "segmentation is the aggregation of prospective buyers into groups  each of which are assumed to have common needs and so should respond similarly to a marketing action."

Joel Knight from WP Engine,Customer Experience, has a great presentation around customer segmentation. It is all about grouping customers to respond to these proactively. Groups of your customers have different attributes that now allow us to create better customer experiences. It doesn't matter if you have a small customer base or a large customer base, segmentation can assist you build more engaged customers by tailoring your communications to their preferences. Today it is a point of differentiation that it is worth exploring.

http://customersuccesssummit.com/

You might not be ready to think of segmentation now but at some point you will need to think about how you group your customer and prospect base.

How to segment a group?

People who share a similar pattern.

Some groupings:

• Product/ Service: what each customer gets
• Size of customer
• Lifecycle: prospect, new customer, longer term customer
• Region: location
• Industry

Take this and then work on the following exercise based on what the content you send to each based on where they are in the lifecyle. It is all about asking the question:

What is your customer's experience with your brand. Then you can complete the exercise below. What can you:

• Start
• Stop
• (Event based and time based)

"The 80/20 rule determines that 20 per cent of customers account for 80 per cent of turnover, and for many companies this amounts to just a handful of accounts. It's important that main clients are provided with products and services tailored specifically to their needs, as their loyalty and continued business is vitally important in terms of business stability and future growth. As such, 'business critical' customers should be treated as individuals in their own segments.

An absence of this knowledge suggests that companies are likely to struggle to accurately target their customer base with relevant segmented products and services an issue that can ultimately affect their ability to gain competitive advantage, increase revenue and profit levels, and inspire customer loyalty." (b2bmarketing.net)

If you are interested in segmenting your database to create more meaningful customer relationships contact us. We can do something as simple as updating your contact form fields to adding groups in your database.