What is segmentation?
In marketing strategy, segmentation means dividing your audience into smaller groups based on characteristics they have in common.
Creating a segment of your audience is just you saying “this specific audience of people have something in common, so I’m going to group them all together.”
Once you organize your contacts based on things they have in common, you can make your marketing more personalized and relevant with tailored messaging.
Really, you probably already do this in your everyday interactions. Do you speak to your mother the same way you do to your best friend, or your boss, or the cashier at the grocery store, or that one wild friend from high school?
Audience segmentation helps you speak to people the way they want to be spoken to.
When should you use audience segmentation?
If you’re new to segmentation, you’re probably wondering when you would even use it.
You might hear things like “emails that are segmented get 69733% more opens” or “businesses that segment their audience double their conversion rates.”
Even though segmentation really can have huge effects like that, those stats on their own don’t teach you how to segment so much as they make you feel guilty for not segmenting.
So when does it make sense to use segmentation?
- When you offer multiple products that serve different audiences
- When you offer multiple products that serve different wants and needs of the same audience
- When you offer one product that serves multiple audiences
There are a lot of different use cases for segmentation, but ultimately it comes down to this: You should segment your audience if that audience is made up of groups of people that care about different things.
Let’s go through some examples of what information you might use to segment your audience.
What should you segment audiences based on?
You can segment your audiences based on pretty much any factor, including:
- Product usage
- Demographics
- Psychographics
- Where they are in the buyer’s journey
- Level of engagement with your brand
- Device (Desktop vs. mobile)
- Behavior
- And so much more!
Ultimately, if you have a good marketing automation platform, you can segment based on almost anything.
Seriously. Here are some of the ways you can segment in InTarget:
The challenge of segmentation isn’t usually about how to segment your target market — you’ll usually be able to think of a few groups that could benefit from different marketing.
