Create strategic segments to maximize engagement
Once you are comfortable building segments, you can start to identify areas of opportunity with your audience. Think about your current customer base. You have people who have never purchased, people who have made 1 purchase, and people who clearly love your brand and purchase consistently. Each type of customer presents an opportunity to increase customer value, or to gain new customers through referral incentives.
Let’s dive into 7 strategic segments you can build that will help you better target and engage your subscribers.
Segments based on profile actions or properties
Explore the tabs below to learn about segments you can build to deliver more personalized and relevant messages that will strengthen your brand loyalty and increase engagement.
Location-based
Location-based segments help you group your audience by geographic area. This data is automatically collected based on information like IP address and shipment or billing addresses. You can use this information to send them location-specific messages.
What you can send to your location-based segments:
- Brick-and-mortar specific offers and exclusives.
- Local events and initiatives hosted by your brand.
- Tailored messages per country-specific regulations or language differences.
- Climate-specific product features at key times (e.g., Promoting weather-resistant outerwear during cold and heavy precipitation months for certain locales).
Learn how to create a location-based segment.
Properties about someone
There are many ways you may have collected profile properties about your subscribers. A classic example is when you have a sign-up form live that asks customers to submit their product preferences, or you create custom questions within a review collection form. You can use these profile properties to create segments based off of your customers’ responses.
What you can send to your properties about someone segments:
- Send a promotion about a new women’s line to only customers who have specified their gender.
- Highlight products in bright shades to those who have expressed interest in vibrant colors.
- Feature a travel product to customers who have shared that they travel frequently.
- Personalized recommendations based on how they rated other products.
Learn more about profile properties.
Segments based on purchase history
Purchase activity provides you with key insights into what types of marketing messages would be most effective for your audience. Click through the below dropdowns to explore different segments you can build based on your customers’ purchase history.
Cross-sell segment
Cross-sell segments empower you to market products to a subset of your customers who have purchased very similar products in the past. You know these customers are more likely to be interested in the product than other customers, based on their purchase history.
For example, Beantown Coffee recently released a new Peanut Butter Chocolate coffee flavor. They have an existing similar product, which is their Hazelnut Chocolate coffee flavor. Because the flavors are similar, Beantown guesses that customers who have purchased the Hazelnut flavor may be interested in the similar nutty flavor of the Peanut Butter coffee, so they create a cross-sell segment of customers who have purchased Hazelnut Chocolate coffee but not Peanut Butter Chocolate coffee yet. They target this segment with a product release campaign about the new coffee flavor.
Learn more about building a cross-sell segment.
Churn risk segment
Creating a churn risk segment allows you to proactively re-engage lapsing customers before they totally fall off from your brand. When a customer hasn’t made a purchase in an extended period of time, nor interacted with your marketing messages, they may qualify as a churn risk.
For example, Beantown Coffee made a segment of churn risk customers to identify profiles they need to win back. They sent a special discount to these customers, acknowledging they haven’t heard from them in a while, and they included links to some of their best-selling products to encourage them to come back and make a purchase.
Learn more about building a churn risk segment.
Holiday or seasonal shoppers
You may have some customers who only purchase from you around the holidays or during specific seasons. With these pattern insights, you can proactively get customers excited for your holiday sales and promotions, and even provide them early access to promotions to strengthen these customer relationships.
For example, Beantown Coffee created a segment of shoppers who made a purchase last fall, when the brand frequently launches their seasonal Pumpkin products. Beantown sends this segment early access codes to pumpkin products right before they launch. Similarly, Beantown creates a segment of holiday shoppers who purchased last year during the month of December, when the brand runs their large Christmas sale. Beantown sends these subscribers targeted messages about their upcoming holiday sales, and gives them exclusive stackable discounts to use on top of holiday sale prices to increase larger purchases.
Learn more about building a holiday shoppers segment.
Average order value (AOV) segment
Average order value (AOV) refers to the average monetary amount of your customers’ orders with your brand. When you create segments based on different tiers of AOV, you can target more specific products based on the likelihood a group of customers would purchase a product of that price.
For example, Beantown Coffee recently released a few different holiday products at different price points:
- White chocolate mocha coffee grounds: $10
- Holiday seasonal 24-pack of Keurig cups: $25
- Ultimate coffee gift set (mug, travel cup, 3 full-size coffee ground bags): $50
Beantown Coffee created AOV segments based on the following price points ($10, $25, and $50) and created targeted promotional campaigns featuring the product of appropriate price to each group.
Learn more about building an AOV segment.
Item- and brand-specific segment
In the tabs above, we walked through how you can make segments based off of product interests as indicated via profile properties. You can also create item and brand-specific segments based on customers’ purchase histories.
For example, Beantown Coffee launched their new Peppermint Mocha Keurig cups for the holiday season. To effectively target promotional messages about the k-cups to people most likely to be interested in them, they created a segment of customers who have purchased both Peppermint Mocha coffee grounds, or who have purchased other flavors of k-cups. These customers are either interested in the specific flavor or in k-cup products in general, so they are great people to market this new product to.
Learn more about building item- and brand-specific segments.