Customer segmentation is more or less marketing 101 these days.
However, you’d be surprised how many enterprises still rely on one-size-fits-all marketing and customer care approaches.
In today’s digital world, accurate and specific customer segments are more important than ever. In a world filled with so much noise, it’s easy for the customer to feel like just another number.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at the connection between segmentation and impeccable customer care. We’ll also share two ways you can use AI to take your customer segmentation to the next level.
Why customer segments are key to customer care
“Market segmentation creates subsets of a market based on demographics, needs, priorities, common interests, and other psychographic or behavioral criteria used to better understand the target audience.”
Qualtrics
In other words, customer segments are groups of customers that share commonalities. Segmenting based on these similarities helps you to understand your customers better — which helps you to serve them better.
The customer experience has never been more important. It’s well reported that bad emotive customer experiences are causing customers to churn, costing brands billions.
This emotional connection, or personalised experience, that customers crave in exchange for their loyalty has become paramount.
So, as an enterprise, the better you’re able to segment your customers, the more able you’ll be to give them the personalised and positive connection they’re seeking.
Customer segments are key to customer satisfaction and retention.
2 ways to nurture your customer segments with AI
1. Marketing automation tools
Marketing automation tools have developed considerably in recent years. It’s possible to create multiple customer segments according to their preferences and therefore deliver only the marketing that’s relevant to them.
Marketing Automation for Dummies lists a few basic types of customer segmentation:
- High-level segmentation on engagement: For example, if you want to keep a list of everyone who’s ever attended a specific webinar, a semi-dynamic list is a good choice because your follow-up marketing probably doesn’t depend on whether those people attend another webinar in the future.
- Segmenting on product interest: A list of people who have shown interest in a specific product segment is a good example of a list that does not need the capability to remove people from it.
- Keeping up with lead stages: Many companies break down their marketing cycle into stages. Fully dynamic lists segmented by the marketing cycle stage are always up-to-date with a clear picture of your lead funnel.
- Segmenting for personal touches: Segmentation can be very useful when trying to find your most influential and most vocal fans. Setting up segmentations to find them and keep them together makes identifying people for case studies and testimonials very easy. When looking to set up a segmentation for vocal prospects, consider looking at lead score, social engagement metrics, and overall activity as key identifiers.
Most marketing automation tools today use AI to process customer data at lightning speed and automatically categorize customers based on that data.
Your marketing team is probably already using these tools. But have they heard of our next AI-based customer segmentation technology?
2. Digital Adoption Solutions (DAS)
The evolution of Digital Adoption Solutions (DAS) now allows enterprises to engage and nurture different customer segments according to their behavior when using digital tools and platforms.
A Digital Adoption Solution provides one of the most useful applications of customer segmentation for your organization. Not only does it track customers effective use of your website or whatever digital system you apply it to, it also automatically engages with your customers based on their behavior.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you’re a bank and you launch a new app. It’s a sophisticated piece of software that allows customers to achieve new heights with their banking — they can now do things they never could before. It’s groundbreaking.
The DAS will segment customers based on their workflows. It can anticipate their mistakes and provide solutions. It can recognize if they’re disengaged and likely to churn — and it can provide exactly the information needed to keep this particular customer segment on board.
Your website or app is likely the central point for your customer experience, so it should be welcoming, engaging, and easy to navigate. It should make customers want to keep finding out more.
Whether customers are browsing and unclear of their goal, or if they know exactly what they are looking for, the DAS is able to satisfy their customer intentions.
Final words of advice
Customer segmentation might be basic marketing, but that doesn’t mean you should still be using basic tools to get the most out of your customer segments.
Yes, today’s customers crave emotional connection. And AI can actually help you to achieve this due to its capacity to process and understand high volumes of customer data.
Technology can help each and every one of your customers to feel like a valued human being.
This is the secret to great customer care and retention, so it’s technology worth exploring.
