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Top Traits for Customer Segmentation

DynamicWeb

How to target and appeal to your customers as individuals, despite being part of a diverse group with unique interests, and how to leverage your own individuality as a company and what separates you from the competition.

You know your online customers are unique individuals, but how do you distinguish one from another? How do you intelligently segment them by their needs and interests?

Customer segmentation allows you to group your customers in order to deliver personalized web experiences and targeted email marketing. It sounds easy. Identify your customers, and then present them with relevant content and product suggestions. Not all the products in your catalog appeal to everyone, so higher relevance leads to higher conversion rates. As an e-business, personalization is an effective way to increase sales. But beyond the technical aspect of having a great online marketing tool, how do you choose to group your customers? What are the most useful parameters when creating customer segments? Here are our four top traits for customer segmentation:

Position in Sales Cycle 

One important trait to identify for making sales is how far along your potential customer is in the sales cycle. A website guest reading an introductory blog article is at a different place in the funnel than a customer downloading a detailed whitepaper on your product implementation process. Use customer segmentation by where they are in the sale cycle in order to guide them towards a sale. Scoring your leads also gives you information on when to reach out with a phone call or email.

Demographics

Demographics are the hard facts about your customers. Customer segmentation groups them by age, sex, location, income, education, how many poodles they own, etc. These demographics give you a wide variety of options for how you want to define groups of customers. If your analytics show that 50-year-olds really like to buy both Product X and Product Y, then make personalized recommendations to maximize sales of these products.

Psychographics 

Psychographics are less quantifiable than demographics. The term refers to the personality and emotional traits of your customers. Some marketers like the acronym VALS for “Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles.” These behavioral, cultural, and attitudinal traits may be more difficult to nail down, but once you do, they are just as powerful as demographics. For example, if you segment customers that care about conservation and the environment, you save yourself a lot of headache if you personalize their special offers for electric cars instead of a diesel 18 wheelers.

Visitor Type and History

Is your visitor a guest or have they been to your site before? If your visitor is a repeat customer that is already logged into their personal profile, then that gives you an opportunity to offer them personalized content or special offers based on past purchases. If your visitor is a first-timer, then you roll out the red carpet with content that tells them who you are and what you offer. Somewhere in the middle, you also have visitors that may have created profiles yet never completed a purchase. Email marketing presents a good opportunity to reach out and reconnect with those potential customers.

Yes, we’re all individuals!

Your customers too! With intelligent customer segmentation using these top four traits, you’re able to group those customers and present automated, personalized experiences on the web. That’s worth shouting about.

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