Audience Segmentation – What is it?

Personalized marketing is the expectation today. Your customer wants to be spoken to as they matter, and you know them.  

 However, knowing them doesn’t stop at just addressing them by their names in your email campaigns. It is about understanding their likes, dislikes, and preferences and knowing what your customer wants from you – even when they don’t.  

This might seem like a daunting task, but it is well worth it when you can reap the rewards of better conversions and loyal customers.  

 It becomes even easier when customers willingly share their personal information with you. According to a Salesforce report,  63% of millennials, 58% of Gen Xers, and 46% of baby boomers will share personal information if you can provide them with a personalized experience.  

 Now what you do with this information matters. You can utilize the tools of audience segmentation to provide your customers the experience they seek.  

What is Audience Segmentation?  

Audience segmentation is the process of dividing your subscriber’s list in a way that brings out the familiar traits in them. This makes it possible for you to reach them through emails, social channels, and more in a personalized way that gets their attention.  

 Generic emails that are supposed to address all your customers do not work anymore. You need to streamline your customers based on their activities, preferences, and personal data and curate messages that work for each group.  

Why is it needed?  

 Audience segmentation can bring a vast difference to your marketing approach. For example, reaching a company board member well in their 40s and reaching an intern in their 20s cannot have the same messaging, especially if you want them to click that CTA button.  

 You have to reach them in a way that makes sense to them, not you. It is all about understanding your customers. Thus, when you have divided your subscribers by traits, location, geography, purchase history, behavioral patterns, and much more, you get one step closer to speaking their language.  

What are the benefits of audience segmentation?  

Audience segmentation has benefits that go beyond what you can perceive initially. It provides your organization and customer with several long-term benefits. Here are some of them:  

1. Targeted approach for each group  

This is among the first benefits you will see right away. You might be creating content based on a particular buyer persona and reaching all your subscribers based on this generic data.  

 Buyer personas are important to understand who you are creating the content for. But, if you go a level deeper and look into how many different subgroups can exist within this group, you will realize the potential of curating content that resonates with each of them.   

2. You can predict customer movement  

In audience segmentation, as you leverage tools of machine learning as well, you can predict their next move.  

If you have questions such as: 

•  Are they visiting a page too often?  
• Have they abandoned their carts multiple times?  
• Are they clicking on the resources several times but not going beyond this step?  

 You can answer these questions by gathering their behavioral data and drawing conclusions about what they are looking for. Now, if your next email addresses a concern they are having in this process, then viola! You solved a problem and probably earned some customer loyalty.  

3. High Click-Through Rate 

When your communications are retable to your customer and talk about them rather than just you then they are bound to interact more with you.  

 A study even revealed that personalized Calls to Action (CTA) have 202% better conversion rates!  

 This reasoning is simple – you are now familiar with the subject lines they would like, what social channels they prefer, what they are looking for in association with you, and the kind of problems that you can help them solve! 

 Understanding your customers will help them, and in turn, help you.   

4. Decreased marketing spend  

Trying to reach our customers without segmenting them first is almost like you are hoping your content reflects their expectations. This method can become expensive quickly.  

 Without understanding what each group requires, you end up creating resources that are helping no one. You might even spend thousands of ad dollars to reach your customers. However, if you simply look inwards at the subscribers you already have and leverage segmentation, you are bound to save a lot on marketing money!  

 Alongside, you will have way lesser unsubscribes that could’ve potentially turned into customers. But because your approach was not for them, they had to unsubscribe. Instead, you can save your subscribers list and make better marketing decisions by segmenting them intelligently.   

Wrapping up!  

Audience segmentation is the tool you need to cater to the customers of today. If you want to reach your customers the right way and strike a chord with them, then this is the way to go.  

With segmentation, your campaigns will be more streamlined, the content more relatable, and customers will be more loyal.  

Salesforce marketing cloud can help you achieve this with ease, and we can help you get there! Contact us today.