5 Universal Customer Segments for Marketing Personalization

The outcome of personalized experience is simple -- getting the right message to right audience at the right time. But to identify the right audience, you need to create customer segments. At Ameex Technologies, we’ve seen that identifying and then creating these valuable segments can be an initial roadblock for customers.

Fortunately, we’ve worked through dozens of customer segmentation builds and have learned a lot about how to help organizations get started. As a result, our team has developed a segment starter kit that includes five universal customer segments that can be used by nearly any organization. When combined with Acquia’s Lift personalization solution, teams can also build influential customer segments on the fly.

Here are the five segments that we believe to be valuable for any for-profit organization 

New Customers

For any organization, new customers or new site visitors require specific messaging to make them aware of the capabilities, products, and resources available. Creating a relevant and compelling experience is critical for this critical segment.

Heavy Buyers

The 80-20 rule is still relevant. An organization’s top few customers often represent a majority of sales. They often navigate the site much more efficiently and may have little need for information shared with new site visitors. They may also respond to promotions differently where some offers may reduce margins with little impact on sales.

Lost or Lapsed Customers

Many organizations do little to reach out to customers who haven’t engaged in a few months. Depending on the purchase cycle, a customer who hasn’t made a recent purchase can be valuable for both sales and customer feedback. The challenge is to understand which incentives are most effective in bringing them back.

Category-Focused Customers

This segment includes customers who purchase/explore just one or two categories while ignoring others. There may be cross-selling opportunities to present information on these other categories. Another approach could be to personalize their experience to focus on the groups proven most relevant to them.

Unconverted Frequent Site Visitors

With any organization, visitors come to the website on multiple occasions, take a look around, and leave without engaging or making a purchase. What will it take to convert these shoppers? What kinds of messaging will keep them engaged longer?  

Measuring Success

To implement effective personalization campaigns, it’s essential to understand our audience. We start by identifying our audience types. Then we look at the goals and objectives that we have for those different types. From here, we begin to model our marketing segments.

Acquia Lift includes real-time data capture and analytics reporting so that we can gauge the effectiveness of our segments and campaigns. This allows us to pivot in real time and make adjustments where necessary. Have we defined a marketing segment too narrowly? Is a campaign with a call to action not engaging our audience? By looking at the data and making adjustments, we can optimize the effectiveness of our marketing efforts.

The Next Step on Customer Segments 

Data-driven personalization solutions like Acquia Lift can take customer engagement to the next level. Ameex clients have found that Lift’s ability to build rule-based customer segments on the fly can help to connect them with the right message at the right time. But the next step is learning HOW to make the segments above, not just which segments they want to develop. At Ameex, we help customers do this every day.