How to Overcome Customer Segmentation Mistakes
Are you looking to make your marketing campaigns more effective and generate a greater ROI? If so, you will need to get your segmentation right – to identify your target audience, craft relevant communication and create hyper-targeted campaigns.
A primary step in campaign management is defining the goal along with the segment you want to target. Most marketers are often in a dilemma whether to run campaigns on a huge scale, potentially to millions of customers, or create hyper-personalized messages to have one-to-one conversations with prospects. Segmentation can be your go-to resolution to achieve a balanced approach.
However, most often than not your segmentation strategy may not fetch the kind of response rates you had hoped to see. Let’s take a closer look and find out why. But before that let’s understand why you shouldn't ignore segmentation in the first place.
The Need for Marketing Segmentation
Gathering leads can be tricky; figuring out how to sell and guide the leads through the sales funnel can be even trickier. The first and foremost step is to understand your audience and break them down into smaller groups united by common characteristics or traits.
Simply put – a successful marketing segmentation strategy makes marketing feel like hitting the target in a dartboard. Your customers are the target and segments the darts that help you focus and aim until they nail the target.
5 Common Segmentation Mistakes You May Be Making
Segmentation requires a lot of sharpening and fine-tuning to get it right. If you are not seeing a good response, it can be due to one of the reasons below:
#1 You Define Segments Too Broadly
The whole purpose of segmentation is to focus on the specific subset of the audience in a way that will drive engagement, elicit response and conversions. It’s good to be all-inclusive; but having more clear-cut segments means that you can create content, messaging and campaigns with magnified focus.
#2 You Use Only Demographic Segmentation
If you have not moved beyond demographics to divide your audience, it’s high time you adopt behavioural segmentation and other modern segmentation techniques to drill down and sharpen your segments into well-defined groups. As a result, you can anticipate customer needs as accurately as possible, understand pain points, predict future behaviour and deliver personalization.
#3 You are Segmenting Based on Instincts, Not Data
Data is the backbone for creating stronger and sharper segments. 61% of marketers in a survey stated that they struggle to access or integrate data from a single source. Ensure to start with clean data and dive deep into it to determine the right dimensions to analyze and segment. If you lack the data, conduct simple tests before finalizing segments.
#4 Your Segmentation Strategy is too simplistic
While data is the key ingredient to derive segments, being creative to see how well you can use the data to your advantage is a must. Most marketers tend to adopt a functional view and see segmentation as a left-brain-oriented analytical activity that involves numbers and data to a great extent. However, it’s essential to adopt a holistic approach where creativity is as important as analytics.
#5 You Plan Campaigns in Response to Business Pressure
Oftentimes, marketers in haste run campaigns across all customers without analyzing their needs, thereby running a risk of campaigns being irrelevant and not adding any value. However, if you start to understand customer behavior, map their needs and run campaigns in alignment with their needs, customers will find your campaigns highly relevant and valuable. Don’t succumb to business pressure and ensure to plan campaigns based on customer behavior for better results.
Automation – The Key to Effective Marketing Segmentation
If any of the above points sound familiar or if you see that your campaigns fail to elicit the expected results, it’s time to re-evaluate your segmentation strategy. To make the targeted marketing approach work, you need a one-stop solution to automate the segmentation process with greater accuracy, relevancy and effectiveness.
With the right tools, you can run high-performance marketing campaigns at scale using a single interface to plan, segment, design, channelize, execute, track and optimize campaigns. Talk to a marketing management specialist and find out if your segmentation strategy is everything it could be.
