Customer Segmentation

Dividing your shoppers into segments based on their characteristics and stage in the customer lifecycle is the process of customer segmentation. You can create a unique shopper experience by personalising key elements and pages across your online store as well as improving your shopper experience with segmented flows. This is targeted, driven content based on a particular segment that your customer falls into. You can place customers into each segment by their behavioural affinities, e.g., tracking a customer’s shopping, are they searching for pyjamas or a summer bikini? Send them an email flow with targeted imagery and some encouraging words.

For example, creating a ‘FOMO’ campaign (fear of missing out) targets the psychological trigger that we, as humans can’t help but react and respond to. Statistically, 56% of us are afraid to miss out on something such as an event or news update. Knowing how to use this in your marketing is essential when it comes to encouraging your online sales.

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How?

Here are some examples of ideal FOMO campaigns you can use:

  • ‘Hurry! Only 1 left!’
  • ‘Selling fast!’
  • ‘Deal ends in - ….’
  • Stir their competitive spirit by showing how many people are currently viewing a product.

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Segmentation Examples

Cart Abandonment:

Call-to-actions are important here, make sure it’s easily accessible in your email flow and not likely to be missed. CTA examples include: Complete My Order, View My Bag, Return to Cart. You can target cart abandonment through the monetary value of their abandoned cart, those who are hesitant to buy or those who have 3 or more items in their cart through targeted email flows (although this is not restricted to these specific examples).

Examples:

Subject Heading: “Hey, did you forget something?”

Re-engage subscribers that have not purchased in over 30 days:

Create an email flow that is captivating, customer-centric and straight to the point. Don’t be afraid to outline the point here, they’ve not purchased in over 30 days so let’s kick in that fear of missing out. Make sure your message resonates with your target audience to encourage an increase in conversions. It is here that you need to win their trust and spark a relationship with the customer that was may have been initially lost. You can do this by showing your support as an online retailer that they can trust you with their purchase with an element of safety provided.

Other Segmentation Examples:

  • Customer Loyalty
  • Geometric Targeting – This can drive physical store footfall.
  • Birthdays
  • New Customers
  • Repeat Customers

Where?

Content personalisation can be placed anywhere from your home pages, targeted email flows, floating bars on the website and landing pages including re-direct URL’s, and visual pop-ups as you visit a new page. They are simple to create and highly beneficial.

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User Experience Examples

One example of how you can pull content through conditional rendering is creating a unique shopper experience through providing size guides. Experiment with jean sales, are you seeing an increase in sales with the encouragement of a size guide available to help or are your sales driven by the images alone and trust in the sizes available? We’ve all had a difficult experience purchasing jeans online due to the lack of trust in the sizes compared with our body shape so going the extra mile by providing that additional touch will encourage your sales.

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A/B Testing

A/B testing is a user experience methodology, showing two variants of the same webpage, app, or email to different segments of customers. A/B testing enables you to inject content and imagery depending on the variety of content the potential customer has viewed or is viewing already. It is here you can compare which variant drives more conversions and push this for each segment moving forward.

Examples:

Comparing imagery focused home pages with text-focused is a simple test to see what drives the most conversions. Often, you’ll find in marketing that simplicity rules so stripping down the copy and leading by imagery works very well, however, depending on your product you should test this properly and act on the outcome.

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Product Recommendations

Product recommendation in eCommerce can make all the difference to customer experience on your online store. One of the world’s largest companies, Amazon, grew the business quickly and to a large scale based on product recommendation algorithms. The placement and logic behind their product recommendation campaigns encouraged a fantastic experience for customers and their sales massively reflected this.

We have learned that brands are using a variety of ways to showcase their product recommendations with 46% of delivery being through email and onsite and 23% of delivery being directly onsite. This is very much in line with customer demand with 40% of consumers preferring product recommendations to be showcased via email and onsite and 31% of consumers choosing onsite recommendations only as their personal preference.

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