Segmentation has long been a staple of marketing, helping retailers to better understand and target markets effectively. There’s a higher chance of pulling potential customers into the purchase journey if you reach them with the right product at the right price with the right promotions in the right place.
Segmentation using demographic classes
But…
You can go further!
Segmentation is great as a theoretical process used to guide strategies and position offerings. But when used as a physical process in a digital medium, such as email marketing or online advertising, it becomes complex and hard to measure. Suddenly, your theoretical AB segment that makes up 20% of your 6m customer base becomes a very real group of 1.25million influential and wealthy individual people.
Segments of 1
How would you maximise revenue from that group of AB customers? You could look to segment deeper, using perhaps psychographics or other qualitative metrics. Or, you could begin to treat each individual customer as just that – an individual.
A poor graphical representation segments of one
In the representation above, a segment of one is understanding, and therefore being able to target, one individual.
In this post, we’ll look at 5 steps you need to take to move beyond segmentation and start creating dynamic and relevant experiences that truely understand the individual.
1: Audit your digital touchpoints
Your customers and visitors flow in and out of purchase journeys and interact with many different touchpoints, so map these out. Include your social networks, email marketing, direct mailings, brand and non-brand inbound SEO and PPC, mobile sites, call centres and in store activity.
The data that can be collected from each touchpoint is extremely valuable. If a customer isn’t engaging with your brand through direct mailings but is really active with your social spaces, then it’s worth reevaluating the effectiveness of reaching them through DM. Every interaction can be related to an individual – in the US, Target attribute every transaction and behaviour from purchases online, instore or competition entries to a unique Guest ID.
Using the behaviour that customers generate combined with your product set, each digital touchpoint can be dynamically adapted using past and real-time behaviour. The task is just in working out how this is done effectively with the best results for both revenue and experience.
2: Get your product data in order
You can’t expect to understand your customers and visitors until your product data is clean and normalised, with key attributes such as “colour” and other corresponding data standardised across categories. Not only will this provide a clean base for your personalisation and “segment of one” segmentation efforts, it also helps by:
- allowing more standardised faceted navigation in your store
- provides more data for your onsite search facility
- improving SEO if attributes are brought out on product pages
3: Define goals – what do you want to do?
“Make the user experience more relevant”; “Increase revenue by cross-selling”; “Create dynamic environments optimised for persuasion”.
Whilst the above are great for defining broad strategies, they don’t say exactly what you want out of “segment of one” targeting.
Each touchpoint needs to have clear defined goals for each possible visitor context. You also need to make sure you’re going to consciously ahieve business goals – for example, if you want to increase revenues then show more expensive products over others; if you want to increase profit then show products with a certain profit margin or higher.
4: Implement the website targeting piece
Find the right technology for you. For example, if you have many digital touchpoints then a provider that is able to collate data from different sources will be needed; if you just have a website, another might just be enough. There are many other considerations – for some advice take a look at our technology guide or get in touch with us today.
5: Optimise and extend
After implementing, we suggest you watch the results for the first month and allow for behaviours to be mined and relationships to be formed. After this initial period, you can then start optimising your “segment of one” strategy. Most providers will allow you to split test different algorithms and it’s in this period that you can play around before settling with a specific strategy that works for you. Rather than continuously test and optimise, we suggest to revist tests for the first three quarters of the year – setting your “best” strategy on 100% for the Christmas period!
Once you’ve got your site humming and producing results, you can then begin to extend your strategy elewhere. For most retailers, we suggest looking into sending personalised, relevant to the individual emails – both transactional and promotional. Relevant product suggestions and content in segmented email campaigns increase clickthrough rates and revenue generation.
Other areas to explore extending personalisation and segment of one technology into are:
- mobile/tablet sites
- social networks – through social login or suggestions on social networks
- instore kiosks
- POS systems and receipt promotions
- Digital signage
- Direct mail
Let’s talk!
The above blog post has hopefully introduced you to 5 key steps to help you move beyond mass-segmentation and into more relevant segment of one dynamic marketing. Personalisation technology helps you understand the individual over multiple touchpoints, providing more relevant experiences to every customer – not just those who fall into a pre-defined bucket!
If you’d like some more information about how we can help with your segment of one strategy, get in touch with us today!
Related posts:
- 7 steps of evolution in personalisation technology
- Relevant personalization influences 80% of Nuwear.com sales
- 5 Steps to getting Personalisation Right
- Trend: providing “persistent” shopping experiences across multichannel devices.
- PeaceLoveWorld personalise onsite experiences with PredictiveIntent and CorraTech.