If you’re struggling to engage customers, don’t know where you’re going wrong, yet you push out content like there’s no tomorrow without a clear return, your problem may be your segmentation methods — or lack thereof.
Customer segmentation could be the strategy you need to see some results from your labor. Combined with Chat Marketing, you can enhance the power of both.
Here’s how you can use customer segmentation to raise the bar for engagement, loyalty, and profit — no matter the size of your business.
What is customer segmentation?
Customer segmentation is a way to divide your customer base into smaller groups according to a set of criteria. This method of categorizing your customers enables you to send messages that appeal to a specific sub-group.
These sub-groups can be characterized as:
- Demographic: gender, age, occupation, marital status, income, etc.
- Geographic: country, state, city, town or county.
- Technographic: preferred technologies, software, and mobile devices.
- Psychographic: personal attitudes, values, interests, or personality traits.
- Behavioral: actions or inactions, spending habits, feature use, session frequency, browsing history, average order value, content consumption
You can mix and match different categories. For example, you can create a segment characterized by women who:
- fall between ages 40-55
- are interested in pants
- have spent over $500 with your business
- have completed three transactions over the past three months
- haven’t engaged with you in two weeks
Armed with this specific information, you can enable personalized messages to a customer segment and help sales for an online store.
Four examples of customer segmentation
Here are a few successful customer segmentation examples that enable valuable customer interactions.
1. Don Marler’s Food Cart
Don Marler, founder of family-owned street food truck best known for its mouthwatering cheesesteak sandwiches, generated more revenue after using geographic segmentation in conjunction with omnichannel marketing.
Here’s how it worked: Don created a post on Facebook announcing his next location, to attract more location-based sales. The post also included a discount code that clicked-through to Messenger.
Once in Messenger, the user was asked to provide their email, phone number, and SMS consent opt-in. Don then segmented each subscriber by their location in ManyChat. This segmentation allowed him to send a relevant SMS to those people whenever he was in their area.
This omnichannel approach, made razor-sharp by geographic segmentation, resulted in more than $7,000 in additional revenue per month for the business. You can find out more about Don’s strategy in this case study on SMS Marketing.
2. Netflix
Netflix uses behavioral segmentation to deliver customized content to its 158.3 million subscribers every day on an automated basis.
It relies on Machine Learning (ML) to learn about its customers via their behavior on the TV streaming app. Netflix then stores this information to segment customers into groups based on their actions, allowing the media services provider to offer a more personalized customer experience.
To illustrate this type of segmentation: If you’re a Netflix user, the company will know which shows you’ve watched in the last month. Based on the information, it can identify your favorite genres and pick content recommendations for you to watch in the future.
This type of customer segmentation can also be used to monetize active prospects. For example, armed with information on a prospect’s recent engagement with your brand, you can encourage them to purchase through personalized recommendations and discounts via SMS, email or Messenger.
Create more targeted customer segments with ManyChat. It’s free to get started.
3. Zinvo Watches
The international timepiece maker, Zinvo Watches, collaborated with Dillon Ceglio — a ManyChat Agency Partner — to segment prospects based on their responses to a quiz executed through Messenger. This let the e-commerce business to offer personalized promos and curated offerings that encouraged purchases.
It worked like this: Customers entered the funnel from a paid ad to the Style Guide. Inside Messenger, they were invited to take part in Zinvo’s quiz. The questions covered preferences such as styles, favorite colors, and when they wear watches.
Users were then segmented into groups based on their responses. For example, a subgroup was made for users who preferred bold colors.
Using this strategy, Zinvo achieved the following goals:
- Help customers at the earliest stages of their buying journey
- Gain user data to deliver tailored offerings and delight customers
- Improve segmentation further through a data feedback loop
- Bring in new leads at a reduced cost
To learn more, we recommend reading How To Use Advanced Targeting in ManyChat to collect customer information and segment using tags and conditions in Flow Builder.
4. Porsche
Porsche recently used psychographic segmentation, dividing its customers based on their lifestyle choices, personality traits, and values. The company then constructed specific profiles for each list, such as ‘The top gun’ for ambitious and driven individuals who crave power and want to be noticed.
This allowed Porsche to:
- Create personalized content based on its customers’ psychographic traits
- Distribute relevant content to the right customers
You can make this approach more effective through Chat Marketing, delivering content to customers through their most frequented channels (like Messenger or email). This way, your customers are more likely to see and engage with your content.
Quick tip: Long-form content is best for emails while short-form content should be reserved for Messenger and SMS. Want to send larger files like videos and images? Messenger will help you deliver them at speed with super-fast uploads.
Using customer segmentation to grow your business
To leverage the power of customer segmentation and Chat Marketing, start by answering the following questions:
- What is your marketing objective? (To improve engagement, increase sales, strengthen customer loyalty, bolster your reputation?)
- What type of customer do you need to target in order to achieve your objective? (Will you segment them by geographics, demographics, psychographics?)
- What form will your content take? (Promotions, offers, educational articles, product videos, surveys.)
- What are your customers’ preferred means of communication? (SMS, email, Messenger or all three?)
This information will help you segment your customers effectively and create a personalized Chat Marketing strategy for your target audience. If you get stuck, simply read our customer segmentation examples for inspiration and direction.
