How many times have you felt like just another number when marketed to? As a customer, or potential customer, you naturally want your needs heard and acknowledged, regardless of whether you're talking face-to-face with a store clerk or receiving online marketing.
As a business, narrowly segment your marketing campaign brings has several benefits. First and foremost, it acknowledges your customers' needs, which gives you a competitive advantage against all your competitors who don't. By understanding the needs of a specific customer base, rather than assuming all your customers are the same, you not only make your marketing more relevant—and therefore more likely to be engaged with—but you also cement yourself as a brand that puts in the effort to know its audience.
It shows you care.
Related content: Understanding your audience
How does narrow customer segmentation work?
When using narrow segmentation, your first step is to go broad and then break down into narrower subcategories. For example, through you’ll might take a broader group of contacts and create subcategories based on common demographic, lifestyle, psychographic or needs-based characteristics.
By segmenting your customers into different, narrow subcategories, you’ll create more targeted experiences for them that result in better marketing and a better ROI from your marketing efforts.
What are the other benefits?
1. More relevant messaging
Not all customers will be interested in the same offers, which makes ability to send highly-targeted messaging to specific groups of your customer database a powerful benefit. Combining narrowly segmentation with personalised offers that meet the unique and specific needs of that segment creates a greater likelihood that your customers will be interested in what you're selling, and with that comes a higher likelihood of sales.
2. Long lasting customer relationships
Just like in real life, when you know certain people well enough it's easier to talk to them—you know what topics interest them and what don't. The more find common ground you find, the better chance you have of developing a great relationship with them.
Narrow customer list segmentation works the same way. It allows you to talk to your customers specifically about what they’re interested in. Over time, they’re more likely to open your emails, welcome your communications and purchase from you as what you’re sending them is actually relevant, which makes you stand out from the crowd.
3. Save time and money
Segmentation is not all about relationships. From a business point of view it also saves your business time and money. By segmenting your marketing campaigns tightly, you reduce time and costs by only targeting a portion of your prospect list instead of wasting money sending everyone a message only some will be interested in. That means less wasted resources and less time spent creating marketing only some of your prospects will want to read.
4. Better response rates
By sending people an offer tailored specifically to their interests, you significantly increase the chance of them acting on it. Customers become more likely to contact you about your business (not the other way around) and they begin (or continue) genuine engagement with your brand.
Compare this with what happens when you send your whole prospect list an offer that was created for a generic, nameless customer? Not much. That’s a case for segmentation if any.
Lastly, it is easy to think that you’re segmenting your customer base narrowly and customising your offers. However, unless you’ve actually sat down and gone through the segmentation process step by step, and are sending out multiple offers targeted to different segments—you’re probably not doing segmentation right or being as effective at it as you could be.
Improve your marketing effectiveness with segmentation and persona development. Download our free ebook Understanding your audience and bet best practice strategies on how segmentation achieves your business objectives.
